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OSMANU UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Call No. & '^ 'ftid 4 Accession No. j
Author '*****
Title
This book should be returned on or before the date last marked below,
WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
Frontispiece
THE ALBATROSS UNDER CANVAS
WESTWARD HO
WITH THE
ALBATROSS
BY
HANS PETTERSSON
Leader of
the Swedish Deep-Sea Expedition
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
E. P. BUTTON 8c CO., INC.
1953
COPYRIGHT, 1953, BY HANS PETTERSSON
All rights reserved
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
FIRST EDITION
No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without permission in luriting
from the publisher except by a reviewer
who wishes to quote brief passages in con-
nection with a review written for inclusion in
magazine or newspaper or radio broadcast.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 53-10865
CONTENTS
Preface 9
1. The Beginning of Things 15
2 Planning the Cruise 25
3. The Start 33
4. The Emerald of the Atlantic Ocean 39
5. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean 48
6. In the Hurricane Region 57
7. The Isles of Eternal Spring 67
8. In the Eastern Pacific 75
9. Nuku Hiva and Tahiti 86
10. From Tahiti to Hawaii 97
11. Hawaii 104
12. A Visit to King David 112
13. The Mindanao Deep 118
14. To the Isle of Strife and the Isle of Beauty 124
15. Across the Indian Ocean 136
16. Bullets from the Cosmos 145
17. An African Interlude 153
18. Cruising in the Mediterranean 165
19. From Monaco to the Cape Verde Islands 171
20. To the Romanche Deep and St. Paul's Rocks 177
21. Fishing at Great Depths 184
22. The Virgin Islands, and the Depths Beyond 192
23. The Mystery of Deep-Sea Radium 199
24. With the Albatross to London and to Gote-
borg 206
25. The Harvest from the Ocean Depths 211
5
ILLUSTRATIONS
(PLATES)
The Albatross under canvas Frontispiece
\.
Plate i. Globigerina Bulloides p. 32
The rising profile of the sea bottom
Plate 2. Jonasson measures the obliquity of the cable, p. 33
Dr. Kullenberg at the controls of the deep-
sea winch
(Between pages 48 and 49)
Plate 3. The long coring tube prepared for lowering
The corer in descent
Plate 4. Taking the corer on board
Kullenberg and Jonasson taking out a core
Plate 4A. Pushing out the inner tube
Arrhenius studying the contents of the corer
Plate 5. Dr. Ericsson with photo-minded Negro children
Mont Pelee
(Between pages 64 and 65)
Plate 6. Dr. Fred Phleger and his plankton samplers
Foraminifera X2O
Plate 7. Going ashore
To a peculiar island (Jameson's Strand)
Plate 8. A dragon on James' Island
The author with a little owl
Plate 9. The large ring-net
Towing the ring-net on the surface
6
ILLUSTRATIONS 7
(Between pages 80 and 81)
Plate 10. The coring-tube bent against a lava bed
Plate loA. The bust of Charles Darwin on Chatham Island
Plate 11. A coconut grove
Lunch with Dr. Lavaud
Plate 12. Taipi Bay
(Between pages 96 and 97)
Plate 13. OffTaihoeBay
Plate 14. Microscopic 'grass* diatoms from the meadows of
the sea (xioo)
Radiolaria (xioo)
Plate 15. Light measurements in the transparent Sargasso
Sea
The geothermometer is put in place
Plate 16. Our doctor wearing an Hawaiian 'lei'
Fishing on Hawaii
(Between pages 128 and 129)
Plate 17. Landing on an atoll
King David and Queen Viora
Plate 18. Madame Pollock, our hostess on Bali
Plate 19. Some beauties and demons of Bali
Plate 20. The gale
. . . and its result!
(Between pages 144 and 145)
Plate 21. Coco-de-mer
Coco-de-mer, vertical section
Plate 22. Sediment with ash zones
Deep-sea fish with long 'feelers'
Plate 23. Volcanic ash layers in core taken from Crete
Plate 24. Deep-sea fish with long 'feelers'
Portuguese Man-of-war
8 ILLUSTRATIONS
(Between pages 176 and 777)
Plate 25. Young boobies on St. Paul's rocks
The most desolate spot in the Atlantic Ocean
Plate 26. A shark with 'remora' attached
Scarlet-colored deep-sea prawns
Plate 27. Our largest deep sea fish
The large dredge brought on board
Plate 28. Large sampler for radium analysis
Jerlov attending to the bathythermograph
CHARTS AND SKETCHES
FIG.
1. Principle of the vacuum core-sampler 19
2. Increase in length of cores obtained, with approxi-
mate ages, from 1873 to 1945 20
3. Using echoes of explosions at great depths to de-
termine depths of sediment 21
4. Ash zones from the Tyrrhenian Sea 23
5. Course of the Albatross 27
6. Simplified bathymetric chart of the Atlantic Ocean 53
7. Succession of climatic periods as shown by Fora-
minifera 65
8. Part of the Albatross' course over the Pacific 78
9. The Atlantic Convergence 81
10. The Indian Ocean basin 138
11. Umbellula from the Romanche Channel 190
12. Change of radium content of cores with age 202
PREFACE
For generations my people have been working by the
sea, on the sea, and struggling with its problems. Our
ancestral home, "Kalhuvudet," which is Swedish for
"head of cabbage" a name which well describes the
shape of the rocky islet on which it's built is a very
old wooden house far out on the storm-swept coast of
the Skagerak. It has miraculously escaped being burnt
down, a fate which sooner or later befalls the wooden
huts and houses of my native province of Bohuslan.
The house lies so close to deep water that during the
Napoleonic wars, in the days of my great-grandfather, a
ship was wrecked immediately in front of it. The cap-
tain, with his wife and their infant son, and the crew as
well, got ashore along the bowsprit, which had rammed
the kitchen window. The site is a lovely one, open to
the wide sea. Through the small panes of the modest
windows glass was scarce at the time when the house
was built sweeps by night the powerful beam from the
"Pater Noster" Lighthouse, illuminating the age-old
rooms. The name of this lighthouse is significant. The
crew of a ship drifting with the strong current against
its wicked rocks had excellent reasons for saying their
prayers. In fact "Kalhuvudet" to a large extent is fur-
nished with quaint old furniture salvaged from wrecks
9
10 PREFACE
in bygone ages when the Lord had blessed the poor
fisher-folk by allowing a good ship to come to grief on
their rocky shores.
That the house is full of ghosts goes without saying.
Not being gifted with second sight, I have never seen
any. And yet, lying awake on a stormy night, when a
gale from the west makes the ancient timber in the walls
creak and groan in every joint, I feel quite ready to be-
lieve the gruesome stories told by the fireside when I
was a boy.
With such ancestry and in such an environment, the
sea is bound to become an obsession, as it was with my
father, a renowned oceanographer who was eager to
probe its mysteries to the time of his death at the ripe
age of nearly ninety-three. He had devoted the greater
part of his life's work to the sea around Scandinavia and
northwestern Europe, and had brought into being the
International Council for the Investigation of the Sea.
My own preference was ever for the great ocean depths,
about which we know practically nothing. Meeting that
grand old man of deep-sea research, Sir John Murray of
Challenger fame, during my student year with Sir Wil-
liam Ramsay in London, had kindled my imagination
and my longing to grapple with the mysteries of the
ocean floor.
But alas, the study of the deep sea calls for stupendous
resources, including a large ocean-going ship fully
equipped for research. The prospect of ever seeing my
dreams of a Swedish deep-sea expedition realized ap-
peared very remote. Well into the iggo's my work had
to be along the lines my father had followed, investi-
gating the water layers round our coasts, their currents
and the curious submarine waves he had discovered in
the Gullmar Fiord from the research station on Borno.
PREFACE 11
But cherished dreams of one's boyhood sometimes do
come true. Through articles in the press, by broadcasts
and by popular science books, the fight for the Science
of the Sea was carried on for years. A well-known Swed-
ish banker and statesman, K. A. Wallenberg, and his
wife, gave large sums to the Royal Society of Goteborg
which made it possible to build and equip an excellent
laboratory, Oceanografiska Institutet. There the weap-
ons for a coming attack on the problems of the deep sea
were forged. There also I found excellent co-workers
who gave valuable help in the planning of our coming
cruise.
World War II cut us off from work in the open sea
but, by way of compensation, gave us time and oppor-
tunities for preparing a round-the-world cruise. The
wealthy men of Goteborg have always been generous to
the arts and sciences. One of them, Major Herbert Ja-
cobsson, chairman of the great Brostrom shipping com-
bine, and his wife, nee Brostrom, bequeathed to the
Royal Society of Goteborg half a million Swedish kronor
(about $98,000 at the normal rate of exchange) toward
the cost of a Swedish deep-sea expedition. A textile and
commerce magnate, Mr. Gustaf Werner, gave a sum
twice as large for the same purpose. Major Jacobsson
also induced the Brostrom combine to lend us their
excellent new training-ship, the motor-schooner Alba-
tross, at net running cost for a cruise estimated to re-
quire fifteen months. In addition, we were allowed to
have her fitted out as a floating laboratory of high effi-
ciency at the Lindholmen Shipyard where she had been
built. This very costly conversion of the space otherwise
used for cargo into cabins, mess-room, laboratories, etc.,
as well as the mounting of our unique deep-sea winch
and the electric plant required for working it, was made
12 PREFACE
possible through the generosity of Mr. Axelsson Johns-
son of Stockholm.
Our whole enterprise thus was financed by private
donors without any support from the Swedish Govern-
ment. To the generosity of these men of wealth and
vision and to the generous collaboration of various lead-
ing Swedish firms who gave us the highest priority for
making our equipment we owe the material basis of our
enterprise, the first deep-sea expedition under the Swed-
ish flag.
HANS PETTERSSON
Kdlhuvudet
WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
Chapter 1
THE BEGINNING OF THINGS
Some three thousand million years ago our Earth was
torn out of the body of her mother the Sun by a stu-
pendous cosmic catastrophe, due to an encounter with
a vagrant star, an unknown father of a whole family of
planets. In this family our Earth occupies an intermedi-
ate position, both with regard to her size and to her
distance from the Sun. A glowing globe of incandescent
gas, she rapidly cooled, like a live coal raked out of a
fire. Within a few thousand years the mere twinkling
of an eye on the cosmic time-scale the cooling effect of
radiation into space transformed her into a dark body
with a remnant of solar heat buried beneath a solid
crust. Gradually the surface temperature fell still lower
until enormous masses of hot water were condensed
from the primeval atmosphere, and so the ocean was
born.
Since that remote past our Earth has remained the
water planet, just as her nearest neighbors among the
heavenly hosts, the dazzling white star of love, Venus,
may be called the cloud planet, and Mars, the fiery red
star of war, the desert planet. Venus, shrouded in im-
15
l6 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
penetrable clouds, is probably still in her pre-oceanic
stage, whereas Mars is supposed to have lost his original
supply of water, which is now largely combined with the
chemical compounds in the crust.
It is possible that in a very distant future a similar
desiccation will overcome our Earth, leaving her bare
and devoid of oceans l a dismal prospect indeed, espe-
cially for us oceanographers, who by that time will have
had to find some other occupation. In her present, for-
tunately moist, state, the Earth exposes to the surround-
ing Universe a surface of which more than 70 per cent
is covered with water no doubt an object of wonder
and envy to inhabitants, if such there be, of other worlds
who may happen to possess powerful telescopes.
It would be rash to assume that the terrestrial globe
representing our Earth today gives a true picture of her
features when she was still in her youth. The surface has
undergone enormous changes. The crust has contracted
and cracked, as the inexorable radiation losses reduced
the temperature of her interior, slowly dissipating her
inheritance of solar heat. Moreover, the ocean surface
has risen and fallen, sometimes inundating the lowlands
around its shores, at other times retreating and laying
bare the bottom of the shallow coastal seas covered with
sediments carried out into the sea by the rivers and con-
sisting of the finest fragments from the remains of
mountains. After periods of millions of years, enormous
forces arising in the shrinking crust have lifted these
1 Since in the realms of natural science there are almost always two
opposite views of the same problem, it is only fair to admit that many,
perhaps the majority, of leading geologists today regard the pessimistic
view of our Earth going dry as incorrect. They assume instead the
amount of water in the oceans to be steadily growing, because of a
surplus of magmatic water disengaged from volcanoes. To this reas-
suring view reference will be made in a later chapter.
THE BEGINNING OF THINGS 17
marine deposits high into the air and crumpled them to
form lofty mountain chains, as a tablecloth is crumpled
when pushed aside by an impatient guest.
In their hardened layers the sedimentary rocks pre-
serve the evidence of their aquatic origin, the imprints
of ancient plants and the shells of long-dead animals.
These markings make the script readable to the geolo-
gist who studies the "record of the rocks/' from which
he is able to reconstruct past happenings on our Earth
and in her oceans. Unfortunately the destructive action
of erosion from temperature variations, frosts, rainfall
and running waterhas cut deeply into these records, so
that pages or even whole volumes are missing, making
the work of deciphering the record laborious and its re-
sults uncertain.
In the deep ocean, on the other hand, the deposits
have never or at least very rarely been disturbed.
They have been formed by an incessant, very slow fall
of minute particles settling from the ocean surface,
many of which are remnants of tiny organisms of the
plankton. 2 Their silica skeletons or calcareous shells
make a large contribution to the carpet spread over the
ocean floor and give indications of the conditions pre-
vailing in the upper water-layers at the time when they
were living. If only the records of the deep could be
thoroughly studied, many obscure chapters in the past
history of our planet would stand revealed to science.
Hitherto, only the very uppermost layers of oceanic
deposits have been accessible to study by means of core-
samplers penetrating a few feet below the surface.
Nevertheless, their study has provided most interesting
results both to oceanographers and to students of sub-
$ A word derived from the Greek and meaning "drifting."
l8 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
marine geology. They afford evidence of great catas-
trophesclimatic, volcanic and structural which have
happened to our planet.
During the Ice Ages the ocean surface was consider-
ably cooler than at present, even near the Equator. The
surface plankton of those times, shedding their tiny
shells over the bottom of the sea, consisted of different
organisms from those of warmer climatic periods. Again,
a local rise or subsidence of the ocean bed, sometimes by
thousands of feet, due to the sudden release of tectonic
forces in the Earth's crust, gave rise to stratified sedi-
ments of a peculiar structure. At other times, rains of
ashes from terrific volcanic outbreaks were spread by
the upper winds over thousands of square miles of sea
surface. Settling down to the bottom, these ash rains
have inserted pages by the god of the fires of the under-
world, Vulcan, into the records kept by his rival, the
sea-god Neptune, in the shape of coarse-grained layers
of "pyroclastic" origin, intercalated in the ordinary fine-
grained sediment. (See Fig. 4.)
During the famous Challenger Expedition of seventy-
five years ago, 1872-76, which threw open the ocean
depths to research, sounding-tubes were used which
stamped out sediment cores between one and two feet
long from the deposits. The maximum core-length ob-
tained half a century later by the German Atlantic
Expedition with the Meteor barely exceeded three feet,
a very moderate advance in fifty years. In the early
1930*5, Dr. C. S. Piggot of the Carnegie Institution in
Washington, D.C., invented an ingenious but somewhat
dangerous device, an explosive sampler, which shot the
coring-tube down into the deposit from a kind of sub-
marine gun, discharged automatically on contact with
the bottom. By means of this sampler, a small number of
THE BEGINNING OF THINGS 19
cores from six to ten feet in length were raised from
the bottom of the North Atlantic between Newfound-
land and Ireland. In these longer cores American geolo-
gists were able to identify four different glacial layers,
deposited at various times when the sea surface in those
latitudes was cooled by drifting ice-floes and icebergs,
the latter broken loose from vast continental ice-caps.
Two different layers of volcanic
ash from great eruptions were
also discovered in some of the
cores. To the uppermost, and
consequently youngest, of these
ash layers an age of about thir-
teen thousand years has been
attributed. An advance to still
greater core-length by this
method proved impractical,
since the charge of explosives re-
quired for overcoming the enor-
mous water pressure prevailing
in great depths, and thus for
sending the tubular projectile
farther down into the bottom,
would have involved still greater
dangers to the ship and its crew.
During World War II, Swed-
ish oceanographers devoted them-
selves largely to improving the
tools of deep-sea research, espe-
cially coring devices, in order to
obtain undisturbed sediment
columns of still greater length.
With these tools we might hope
to penetrate much farther back-
MOUTH-
piece
HEAVY
COUNTER
WEIGHTS
Fig. i .Principle of
the vacuum core-
sampler.
2O WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
ward in time, that is, to obtain much older "volumes"
of the records of the deep. In 1942 the so-called vacuum
core-sampler, in which the high water pressure was used
for forcing the column of sediment to rise inside a long
coring-tube made from fine Swedish steel, was con-
structed by the author in collaboration with Dr. B. Kul-
lenberg. (See Fig. i.)
I9Z5
3'
1942
10*
19*5
65*
-45000 y*J_
T
T
Fig. 2. Increase in length of cores
obtained, with approximate ages,
from 1873 to 1945.
With this instrument, an undisturbed core nearly 50
feet long was raised from the bottom of the Gullmar
Fiord. Three years later a much improved apparatus,
the piston core-sampler of Dr. Kullenberg's devisingin
which water pressure is also used yielded a record core
THE BEGINNING OF THINGS
nearly 70 feet long. A core of that length, if taken from
the slowly accumulating red clay in the great depths of
the Atlantic Ocean, would correspond to a span of time
of about three millions years. (See Fig. 2.) This indi-
cates the progress in core-length made since the Chal-
lenger days. In a similar core taken from the central part
of the Pacific Ocean, where the red clay is deposited five
to ten times as slowly, the lowest portion should have an
age of twenty to thirty millions years.
Another Swedish scientist, Professor W. Weibull, of
the famous Bofors Armament Works, assisted us by de-
veloping a method for measuring the thickness of the
sediment carpet spread over the ocean floor. This
method records the echoes from charges exploded at
great depths. Strong echoes are thrown back against the
upper sediment surface, whereas much fainter and more
or less retarded echoes are reflected against the lower
surface of the sediment carpet, after the explosive wave
has travelled twice through its whole thickness. The
velocity of sound in
the sediment is higher
than that in water,
and once it is ascer-
tained, the time lag
between the upper
and the lower echoes
affords a means of
calculating the thick-
ness of the sediment
carpet down to the
reflecting layer. (See
Fi g- 3-)
In order to test
these and other new
Fig. 3. Using echoes of explosions at
great depths to determine depth of
sediment.
22 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
tools of research in much greater depths than those
found off our Scandinavian coasts, the Swedish Govern-
ment gave us permission to use the State research ship
Skagerak for an experimental cruise to the western Med-
iterranean during April and May of 1946.
Although the Skagerak was not properly equipped for
work with such heavy gear as the core-samplers required,
a number of cores from 20 to 50 feet long were raised
by Kullenberg, who directed the sounding operations,
from depths between 1000 and 2000 fathoms. In three of
these unique cores especially, taken between the Gulf of
Naples and Sardinia, a great number of volcanic ash
layers were found, probably due to explosive eruptions
of Mt. Vesuvius and of neighboring volcanoes in his-
toric and prehistoric times. Fig. 4 gives tentative dat-
ings for the more recent of these eruptions, including
the terrible outbreak of A.D. 79, when Pompeii and Her-
culaneum were destroyed. Investigations of the physical
and chemical character of these cores, their content of
minerals, calcareous shells, of radium and of pollen
grains, have yielded results of great interest. Weibull's
echo soundings of the carpet of sediment off Algiers in
the Tyrrhenian Sea gave very promising results, and the
experience gained led to further improvements in his
method.
During the last weeks of the cruise, biological investi-
gations, trawlings and dredgings were carried out at
great depths between the Strait of Gibraltar and the
Josephine Bank far out in the Atlantic. Dr. O. Nybelin,
Director of the Natural History Museum in Goteborg,
who directed this work, found among the catch three
bathypelagic, or deep-sea, fish new to science. (See repro-
duction of one in Plate 22.)
In Sweden great interest was evoked by the new tech-
THE BEGINNING OF THINGS
AO
8m - T
9m-
10* -
'6*1.
-7-..
Fig. 4. Ash zones from the Tyrrhenian Sea.
24 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
nique and by the prospects it offered of penetrating
deeper into the ocean floor and unravelling its secrets.
The large funds required for a Swedish expedition to
sail around the world were given by private donors to
the Royal Society of Goteborg, and the new training-
ship of the Brostrom combine, the Albatross, was lent
us for the expedition on very generous conditions.
My dreams were to come true after all.
Chapter 2
PLANNING THE CRUISE
To plan an Earth-circumnavigating deep-sea cruise on
the Monaco world map of the ocean depths is a fascinat-
ing task. There are so many parts of the ocean floor
which offer exciting problems. The deep "trenches"
with their incredible depths of from 4000 to nearly 6000
fathoms, the enormous submarine ridges or mountain
chains like the Central Atlantic Ridge, which divides
the Atlantic Ocean into two separate valleys, the prac-
tically unexplored southern parts of the Pacific and the
Indian Oceans: these are all tantalizing objectives to
the oceanographer.
To us, planning the Swedish Deep-Sea Expedition,
the scope had, however, to be limited for technical rea-
sons. The very heavy gear used in coring represented a
load on our deep-sea winch which, with increase of
depth and of length of the wire rope used, could reach
a maximum of about ten tons. This precluded work in
the storm-swept waters of the higher latitudes where
opportunities for coring operations would necessarily be
limited to occasional spells of calm weather. We had,
therefore, to keep within the fair-weather region of the
25
26 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
globe, i.e. to the belt of the equatorial calms, and to
avoid as far as possible work in latitudes beyond 30
North and South. Fortunately the ocean floor in the
tropics, and especially near the Equator, presents fea-
tures of special interest, with depths varying between
2000 and 3000 fathoms. Furthermore, it had rarely been
followed over long distances by earlier deep-sea expedi-
tions, which have generally crossed it along more or less
meridional courses.
Another limitation we had to consider was that of
time. The Albatross had been lent to us for a cruise of
fifteen months' duration, to which must be added three
months for fitting her out before the cruise and two
months for reconverting her to a combined freighter
and training-ship. In the equatorial calms we could not
expect to have much use for the sails, but would have
to depend largely on the auxiliary diesel engine. With
its nominal 600 h.p. it gave the Albatross a speed of
eight to nine knots in fair weather. Against a head
wind or an adverse swell the speed fell to four knots, or
even less. We were advised to base our calculation on an
average speed of only seven knots. In order not to ex-
ceed the time-limit, we had to avoid making any great
detours however tempting they might appear. The
course actually followed appears on the map in Fig. 5.
We had originally intended to start with a three-
months cruise in the North Atlantic Ocean down to the
Equator and, after that, to pass through the Caribbean
Sea and make our entry through the Panama Canal into
the still vaster field of work offered by the Pacific Ocean.
Various difficulties of a technical nature, however, de-
layed the start from the beginning of March to early
July. Had we then followed the original plan, we would
28 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
have entered the Caribbean at the height of the hurri-
cane season. Later on, in the Indian Ocean, we would
have had to battle against the southwest monsoon and
the intense surface currents it raises. We were thus
obliged to postpone our extensive Atlantic program, tak-
ing a short-cut to the West Indian waters, and to hope
for a chance of making our planned circuit down to the
Equator on the return voyage. This change of plans
also made it necessary to postpone the concluding stage
of the cruise: biological work in the great depths of the
Atlantic Ocean. As it turned out, this delay actually pre-
sented decided advantages, especially in the experience
gained in handling the great winch and its long wire
ropes during coring operations in the two other oceans.
Like the Challenger Expedition, we had opportuni-
ties of visiting various ocean islands, several of them of
great botanical interest. Our Swedish authority on the
Pacific island flora, Professor C. Skottsberg, had intended
to travel with the expedition from Panama to Hawaii.
For various reasons, to our great regret, he had to give
up the plan. Instead he delegated to the ship's surgeon,
Dr. J. Eriksson an experienced naturalist and a splen-
did photographer the task of making botanical collec-
tions on the islands visited. In the Pacific and the Indian
Oceans, Eriksson also made a number of hauls with a
large ring-net, which caught those fantastic bathypelagic
fish and the invertebrate animals which inhabit the
intermediate water layers, a few thousand fathoms above
the abyssal ocean floor.
But our main purpose was the investigation of the
ocean bottom at great depths, its deposits, their inter-
action with the ocean water, and the thickness of the
sediment carpet. Dr. B. Kullenberg, ably assisted by our
expedition's mechanic, Mr. A. Jonasson, conducted these
PLANNING THE CRUISE 2Q
complicated operations with consummate skill. In rem-
edying initial troubles with our big winch and other
equipment, valuable help was given by the chief engi-
neer of the Albatross , Mr. H. Enwall. Our second objec-
tive was to measure the thickness of the sediment carpet
by the method developed by Professor W. Weibull, who
conducted the operations in person during our first
Atlantic crossing. During the rest of the cruise, the sedi-
ment soundings were carried out by Mr. V. Wen/el, a
pupil of our Swedish authority on ionospheric research,
Professor O. Rydbeck of Goteborg. Wenzel also seized
the opportunity of sounding the ionosphere, a hundred
miles or more over our heads, by means of short radio
waves, for which purpose he had a special set of instru-
ments mounted in one of our laboratories.
The program in physical oceanography comprised a
study of the water layers from surface to bottom, their
temperature and salinity, their content of dissolved oxy-
gen, of nutrient salts, etc. The cruise afforded excellent
opportunities for studying the Equatorial Counter-Cur-
rent with its complicated dynamics, and the adjacent
regions of "divergence" and "convergence," that is, of
water masses descending or rising up to the surface from
below. This important work was entrusted to Dr. N.
Jerlov and Dr. F. Koczy, who made four complete sec-
tions across the equatorial current system in the Pacific
Ocean and two in the Indian Ocean. In addition, meas-
urements were made of the submarine daylight in dif-
ferent spectral regions, including the ultraviolet, by
means of specially constructed instruments, and also of
the particles suspended in the water at different depths.
A special feature of our program was the study of the
radioactive elements, uranium and radium, present in
sea-water and in the deposits. Research extending over
gO WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
many years, partly in Sweden, partly in Vienna, and
also, more recently, in the United States, had indicated
that radium, continuously replenished by production
from its mother element ionium, is present in sediment
cores at great depths. These radioactive "time-keepers"
afford a means of measuring the age of the different
strata of sediment and the rate of deposition. This for-
tunate circumstance opens a possibility of studying the
chronology of the deep-sea sediments, and by these
means we may be able to date the records of the deep.
For this purpose a water-bottle of special construction,
capable of raising large volumes of sea-water (seven gal-
lons at each haul), was included in our equipment.
All these and many other minor details of equipment
had to be considered in drawing up the program for the
expedition. The Royal Society of Goteborg assigned this
task to an organization committee with Governor M.
Jacobsson as chairman, Major H. Jacobsson, Mr. T. E.
Brostrom, Professor C. Skottsberg, Dr. O. Nybelin and
the author as members, and with Dr. B. Kullenberg as
secretary. This committee was also in charge of fitting
out the Albatross with laboratories, etc. Here we had
the great advantage of being able to use all the space
otherwise used for cargo.
In the fore- and aft-holds of the ship our heaviest gear
was located. The great electric deep-sea winch with its
motor and drum for the wire ropes was mounted in the
fore-hold, while the diesel electric plant for generating
the current for the winch was set up in the aft-hold.
Profiting from the experience of earlier expeditions we
separated the storage of the long wire rope from the
operation of hoisting and lowering it with a full load.
The latter function was carried out by two large re-
PLANNING THE CRUISE Jl
volving drums with grooves over which five to seven
turns of the wire rope were laid. Thanks to this arrange-
ment and to the excellent quality of the main wire rope
from Wright Ropes Co., of Birmingham, the operations
both of coring and of trawling at great depths down to
a maximum of 4300 fathoms were carried out without
any serious mishap. But the control of the wire rope,
especially in a rising wind and swell, was often a nerve-
racking job for the operators.
Besides cabins for a staff of ten to twelve, and a
mess-room, we had on two decks no less than nine
laboratories for various purposes, all of which were
air-conditioned for work in the tropics. In addition, a
large low-temperature room kept at about 40 F. was
used for storing the precious sediment cores in an un-
changed condition. Compared with earlier expeditions
our accommodations were very spacious and proved well
adapted to all the different kinds of work we had to
carry on. As experience proved, the Albatross had been
converted into a very efficient floating laboratory and
workshop.
Besides the specialists already mentioned, Mr. G.
Arrhenius, geologist, was in charge of the operations in
the sediment room, assisted by my son, Mr. R. Petters-
son. Both Dr. J. Eriksson and, during the concluding
Atlantic cruise, Dr. O. Nybelin, in addition to their
zoological and botanical work, gave much help with the
operations required for extracting the cores, carrying
out a preliminary examination, describing them cur-
sorily and packing them hermetically for cold storage.
Indeed the spirit of teamwork pervaded the whole scien-
tific and technical staff, everyone willingly lending a
hand outside of his own specialty.
g2 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
The ship was most ably commanded by Captain Nils
Krafft and his officers. The crew, including twelve young
apprentices, carried out their share of the work with a
will and contributed to the spirit of co-operation which
characterized the entire enterprise.
PLATE i
GLOBIGERINA BULLOIDES
1 \ m - \ ' v * ; '-'^wmf 1
^fei-^4;.- ; ft : : 1 >'":-^^aBBg
i^Ssa^SMMM^' ^.ai^'cv... =. ;: ,: !iili*l&;i:
/. Eriksson
THE RISING PROFILE OF THE SEA BOTTOM
PLATE 2
J ONASSON MEASURES THE
OBLIQUITY OF THE CABLE
DR. KULLENBERG AT THE CONTROLS
OF THE DEEP-SEA WINCH
Chapter 3
THE START
A deep-sea expedition scheduled to last for fifteen
months and equipped with various new instruments is
not easy to plan. Our team had been working hard for
several years on the planning and preparations, and the
concluding months were hectic. All went well, however,
and on the 4th of July in the year of grace 1947 every-
thing was ready, all hands were on board and the fare-
wells of wives, children, relatives and creditors were
over. It was a fine summer day with a clear sky and a
moderate breeze. We slipped our moorings and the
snow-white Albatross, a stately sight to behold, slowly
moved out of the harbor of Goteborg saluted by sirens,
flags and waving handkerchiefssome wet with tears.
We on board were in an elated mood, for our great
adventure was just beginning. We had, literally speak-
ing, the whole world before us. The deep ocean bed
with its secrets, hidden for millions upon millions of
years, was waiting to be explored. There were also en-
ticing prospects of seeing with our own eyes the splendor
of the ocean islands, their waving palm trees, their blue
lagoons fringed with dazzling white coral beaches. But
33
34 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
would everything turn out as we hoped? Would our
highly complicated gear work to our satisfaction, and
make the ocean floor give up its secrets or would our
precious wire ropes snap under the terrific strain, one
after the other? Would our long core-samplers stick in
an unyielding sediment, forcing us to turn back without
any long deep-sea cores to show? Many of our colleagues,
as we well knew, had serious doubts that we could
achieve what we had set out to do. The whole enterprise
was so novel that such doubts were not unwarranted.
But everyone, including the skeptics, wished us god-
speed, good luck and a happy return.
As early as the second day out, the sea had changed
her mood. A hard wind blew from the southwest, and
there were low drifting clouds chasing each other above
our heads, a sure sign of more wind to come. The Alba-
tross started curtseying to the rising swell, a graceful
movement to which some on board responded ungra-
ciously. But she was a splendid ship, eminently sea-
worthy, and she had been trimmed with extra ballast by
experts, so that her movements were surprisingly mod-
erate even in a rough sea. Nevertheless, several of our
young apprentices were violently sick, while others grew
paler and more unsteady on their legs with each new
gust of wind. The members of the staff, fortunately, kept
their chins up and there was no craving for "Mothersill"
or for other popular remedies against what the French
politely call mal de mer. Our excellent doctor, having
no other outlet for his energy, seized the opportunity of
giving us various injections against half a dozen mortal
maladies encountered in tropical harbors.
All through the Skagerak, the North Sea and the
Channel strewn with melancholy relics of World War
II in the shape of masts of ships which had been sunk by
THE START 35
mines or torpedoes the same headwind hampered our
progress, reducing our speed from eight knots to six, and
from six knots to four or even three. To us who had
over 40,000 nautical miles to cover in a bare fifteen
months minus time allotted for work at sea and for
refitting in harbors this crawling rate of progress gave
dismal prospects for the future. But even a headwind
does not blow forever, and we eventually reached the
Bay of Biscay, where, for the first time, we met with
depths exceeding 2500 fathoms.
Our entry into these troubled waters, the terror of
all passengers subject to seasickness, was greeted by two
giants of the deep, a couple of enormous blue whales
which, supremely indifferent to our ship, came to close
quarters, lustily blowing their spray high up into the
air. Other visitors were two carrier-pigeons which
alighted on deck in an exhausted condition. Reinvig-
orated by a square meal and a rest in my cabin, they
soon took wing again, carrying their messages to an
unknown destination.
Two very pleasant engineers from the Marine Instru-
ments Co., of London, accompanied the expedition
from Goteborg to Portugal, in order to test and trim the
new recording echo-sounder, which presented a number
of highly ingenious features meant to increase its range.
They had made a similar trip with the Skagerak on her
way to the Mediterranean in 1946, when the instru-
ment was still in an experimental stage. They reminded
me of a radio message I had proposed, on that occasion,
to send to their respected chief in London, Mr. Arthur
Hughes, when they were in despair over the unsatisfac-
tory results they first obtained in Biscayan waters: "Bot-
tom of Biscay in unresponsive mood. Skagerak's bottom
sore with transmitting. Your two representatives gone
36 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
overboard looking for missing echoes. Wreaths may be
sent to Lisbon. The ways of Providence are unfathom-
able/' The message was not dispatched, but a draft of it
still adorns the walls in their office.
To the powerful beam of ultrasonic waves sent out by
the new transmitter from the Albatross even the Bay of
Biscay now responded, giving echoes indicating a depth
of 2700 fathoms. This encouraged Kullenberg to start
the sounding operations, but when the corer came up its
contents were practically nil. Evidently it had hit hard
bottom, a most surprising result at this great depth,
where one would expect to meet a sediment carpet of
considerable thickness. Had we happened by chance to
hit a spot where strong bottom currents had scoured the
bed-rock beneath free of deposits, or struck a basaltic
effusion from a recent submarine eruption? As there
were no fragments from the hard bottom sticking in the
bit of the corer, there was no answer to these tantalizing
questions.
On the following day Weibull exploded one of his
charges at a depth of 1400 fathoms, halfway down to the
bottom. Echoes, reflected both from the bottom itself
and from the water surface above, were distinctly re-
corded, but there was no trace of deeper echoes such as
might have been thrown back against the lower surface
of a sediment carpet. The thickness of the latter cannot,
therefore, have been more than, say, 10 to 20 fathoms
and most probably was nil.
On July 15th we reached Leixoes, harbor of the city
of Oporto. We visited this ancient town and sampled
the vintages for which it is famous. Afterward we
brought on board a small stock of excellent port wine,
from which we derived considerable comfort during the
cruise. Our English guests left us, satisfied with the
THE START 37
proper functioning of their echo-sounder. Spare parts
for the ship's diesel engine, which had followed us by
air, had duly arrived in Lisbon. Our naive hopes that
they would be released by the Portuguese Customs Of-
fice were shattered the following day. The word manana,
which literally means "tomorrow," but which can actu-
ally be interpreted as "the day after the day after the
day after tomorrow, if it pleases God," is the national
proverb in Portugal. It serves as an iron curtain against
all northwest European hustle, which is altogether futile
in the easy-going South. We had to wait for three weary
days in Leixoes before our indispensable parcel was de-
livered into our hands by a perfect example of official
sluggishness.
However, our forced inactivity was used for making a
trip by car to the mountainous north, visiting the fa-
mous shrine of Vania de Castelo. We were taken to
remarkable ruins perched on the top of a steep hill,
from which there was a glorious view up and down the
coast. The ruins were said to be remnants of a long-
vanished pre-Phoenician culture, and to have the ma-
ture age of about six thousand years. Being on the
lookout for sediments millions of years old, we were
not overly impressed.
Our return journey to Oporto was enlivened by the
reckless speed at which our chauffeur drove us along
precipices and around hairpin bends, the only activity,
besides talking, which the Southerners carry on at top
speed. We suggested that he should apply for a transfer
to the Customs Office, where he might inject some pep.
According to our itinerary, we should have set course
W.S.W. from Leixoes, heading straight for the West
Indies and Martinique, where Fort-de-France was our
next port of call. But at the first sounding taken in the
38 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
Bay of Biscay, our big winch had already displayed dis-
quieting symptoms of running warm. On a close inspec-
tion, our chief engineer found that the base on which
the winch was mounted had given way slightly on one
side, only by a fraction of an inch but sufficient to
increase seriously the friction in the bearings of the
large drums. It was necessary to correct this, and as that
could be done only in the calm water of a harbor, we
decided to run down to Funchal on Madeira before
crossing the Atlantic Ocean. The very idea of spending
weeks in a Portuguese harbor, trying to rouse the offi-
cials out of their manana torpor, made us shudder.
Chapter 4
THE EMERALD OF THE
ATLANTIC OCEAN
Scanning the Monaco chart of the Atlantic Ocean
depths, one's attention is drawn to the region lying to
the west and southwest of the Strait of Gibraltar, be-
tween the parallels N. 30 and N. 37. Here is a strange
submarine "landscape." Enormous mountains run up
from depths exceeding 14,000 feet, with their flat sum-
mits only a few hundred feet beneath the ocean surface.
Their horizontal extent is so limited that it took years
of painstaking labor, by means of mechanical sounding
instruments, to locate them. Because of their slimness,
they had slipped through the wide-meshed net of earlier
hydrographic surveys. Cable-laying operations helped
to reveal their presence.
A newly-laid submarine telegraph cable between Lis-
bon and Madeira soon broke down and had to be re-
paireda very tedious operation. A few months later
another break occurred at almost the same spot, where
the great depth would not have led one to suspect any
obstacle endangering a cable. Then, after a detailed
study of the depths near the critical spot, the obstacle,
39
40 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
or rather pinnacle, which had caused the damage was
discoveredthe steep, almost precipitous slopes of the
Seine Bank, on which the cable had become strained
beyond its critical point. Further investigations under-
taken on a more extensive scale revealed three more of
these skyscrapers of the deep: the Josephine Bank, the
Gettysburg Bank, and the Coral Patch. Rising at angles
which rival those of many lofty peaks in the Alps or in
the Andes, these submarine alpine needles lift their
crests sufficiently near the surface for a ship to anchor
there, right in the open ocean.
There can be no doubt about the origin of these
famous banks. In the Indian Ocean, and still more in
the Pacific, such mementos of volcanic forces are quite
common. Most of them, however, are crowned with dia-
dems of snow-white coral, forming the atolls, reefs and
lagoons of the South Seas. In the Atlantic Ocean exten-
sive coral growth is much rarer, especially along the
eastern boundary. Here the basaltic rocks, levelled by
wave action at a time when the sea surface was lower
than at present, are naked, swept clear of all sediment
by the scouring action of tidal currents.
During our experimental cruise with the Skagerak in
the preceding year, we had devoted a couple of days to
echo-soundings and biological investigations of the
Josephine Bank, first discovered in 1883 by a Swedish
man-of-war of the same name. With the Albatross we
now passed over the Seine Bank, where our echo-
sounder drew a picturesque contour. But Weibull's at-
tempt to investigate the structure of the bank by means
of exploding depth-charges yielded no positive results.
The great volcanic eruptions have resulted not only
in submarine mountains but have also given rise to
lovely islands of which that of Madeira is by far the
EMERALD OF THE ATLANTIC OCEAN 41
most famous. Her enchanted gardens, filled with flowers,
shrubs and trees belonging both to the temperate and
to the subtropical zones, form a mantle of brilliant ver-
dure for this wonderful "daughter of the deep sea,"
the "Emerald of the Atlantic." To us on board the Alba-
tross, approaching the island on an early summer morn-
ing, she was a roseate dream floating on a sea of lapis
lazuli.
For several hours our echo-sounder had been record-
ing a series of steeply rising and falling curves, repre-
senting submerged rivers of ancient lava, separated by
deep chasms. Behind us we had the Seine Bank, an is-
land stillborn, with its wave-worn crest submerged be-
neath a hundred fathoms of ocean water, whereas
Madeira carries her lofty pinnacles to heights of more
than 6000 feet above the ocean out of which she was
born.
A day-born dream of divine unreason,
A marvel moulded of sleep no more?
as Swinburne sings in his exquisite poem, "A Swim-
mer's Dream." When did the catastrophe occur which
gave birth to Madeira, making volcanic cones shoot up
from the abyss, emitting enormous masses of red-hot
lava over the ocean floor? One or two scores of million
years ago, say the geologists, who have as little respect
for large numbers as have astronomers or modern fin-
anciers. But long after that remote time the strange
forces remained at work, piling up the lovely island,
making her still more picturesque by adding new vol-
canic cones to those of earlier dates. Indeed several of
them are, geologically speaking, of quite recent origin.
The very youngest among them may have been forged
after the dawn of Western civilization.
42 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
This possibility raises the old and ever-renewed ques-
tion: ''What about Plato's Lost Atlantis?" The wonder-
ful kingdom of the deep, ruled by ten kings, descendants
of Poseidon the great island kingdom from which the
first attempt was made to subjugate Europe, and which
disappeared beneath the waves during a day and night
of terrible catastrophe? Is this only "a day-born dream
of divine unreason"? Or are there real facts behind the
immortal tale, as related in the two Platonic "Dia-
logues," Timaeus and Critias?
Every argument advanced so far in defense of the
reality of the fabulous submerged island kingdom has
been shattered by critical research. No organized civil-
ization existed, either outside or within the "Pillars of
Hercules" more than a hundred centuries ago, as Plato's
romance will have it. But perhaps an oral tradition of
great floods due to volcanic action, submerging the
shores of the northwest African coast and the southwest
European coast may have survived until Hellenic times
and may form the nucleus about which Plato has spun
his golden tale. Who knows? A wise man has said: "One
has to be skeptical even of one's own skepticism."
The snow-white hull of the Albatross, with her four
towering masts, made a fine picture in every harbor
we visited. Perhaps never had she appeared to greater
advantage than here, with the amphitheater of emerald-
green slopes as a background, and behind them the rose-
colored hills rising up toward a sapphire-blue sky. Our
friends ashore, who gave us a hearty reception, expressed
their admiration for this most beautiful expedition ship,
the first for many years to visit Funchal. We had re-
nowned predecessors. Here the greatest explorer of mod-
ern times, Captain James Cook, made a landing on his
EMERALD OF THE ATLANTIC OCEAN 43
last and most famous expedition to the Pacific Ocean,
in the year 1772. A tulip tree which he then planted in
one of the gardens was shown to us as a venerable relic.
H.M.S. Challenger touched at Funchal, both when out-
ward bound in 1873 and on the return voyage in 1876.
Half a century later, the Danish expedition ship Dana
also visited Funchal. Its leader was the great biologist,
Dr. Johannes Schmidt, who solved the mystery of the
migrations and the propagation of the common eel.
These, as well as many other expeditions, had been
given the same cordial reception by hospitable Funchal
as we enjoyed.
We were taken to the merchant house of Blandy,
which handled all matters pertaining to our ship and to
the formalities of our call. Our visit was extended to
their wine cellar, one of the oldest in Funchal. We were
initiated into the making and the treatment of the
noble Madeira wine, beloved by the English as early as
the Elizabethan era. Shakespeare, for instance, in the
First Part of King Henry IV, writes: "What says Sir
John Sack-and-Sugar? Jack, how agrees the devil and
thee about thy soul, that thou soldest him on Good Fri-
day last, for a cup of Madeira, and a cold capon's leg?"
We were not offered any capon's leg by our friendly
tempter, but the very old wines he served us were a
comfort to the soul. We started with bottled sunshine, a
venerable Solera reserve of 1792, worthy of the palate of
the Prince Regent himself. We proceeded to a rare Bual
of 1808, and then to an exquisite Bual Solera of 1826.
In a most agreeable way we passed through the first half
of the last century, until the terrible year of 1852, when
the vineyards of the island were all but completely laid
waste by a fungus blight, known by the name of Oidium
Tuckerii. With the aid of sulphur, the blight was
44 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
checked and the vineyards were replanted, but not for
long. In 1873 an insect pest, Phylloxera vastatrix, which
settled on the roots of the vines, sapped their life-blood
and killed them outright. The vine culture was resusci-
tated for the second time by means of imported Ameri-
can vines resistant to Phylloxera. But the quality of the
wine was poor, until, by grafting shoots from surviving
Verdelho vines on to the imported stocks, grapes of
quality and resistance were obtained and the wine in-
dustry survived.
At present, the wine trade is suffering from other ail-
ments. The exchange restrictions make it well-nigh
impossible, both for the English and for Swedes the
chief consumers of the Madeira wines of today to buy
the quantities normally consumed.
Another mainstay of the lovely island was the tourist
traffic, which inevitably suffers from the same restric-
tions. Even the proverbially wealthy English have diffi-
culties in raising the escudos required for a winter in
Madeira. Scandinavians, for the same reason, also fail to
go there. Americans, strange to say, do not seem to have
taken to this delightful resort. The big hotels, as well as
the dealers in the diverse handicraft products of the
island, such as baskets, woodwork, Madeira lace and ex-
quisite embroidery, are hard hit by the ebbing of the
tourist stream. To those who know the island, this seems
a pity, since a more alluring refuge from the rain, the
snow and the fog of the sunless northern autumn and
early winter cannot be imagined. Thanks to the sur-
rounding ocean, the seasons are retarded, the warmest
months being September and October. As early as De-
cember strawberries are ripe and public parks, as well
as private gardens, are resplendent with multicolored
flowers.
EMERALD OF THE ATLANTIC OCEAN 45
We were fortunate in meeting one of Madeira's most
distinguished men of science, Mr. Walter Grabham,
who gave much time to us, showing us the sights of his
beloved island. After many years of active service as
geologist to the Sudan Government, Mr. Grabham re-
tired to Funchal where he was born. His father, Dr. M.
Grabham, was well known for his natural history studies
of Madeira; he died in 1935 at the great age of ninety-
five. Mr. Grabham is a leading authority on the geology
and the plants of the island. His mother, nee Blandy,
was the sister of Lady Kelvin, married to the then Sir
William Thomson, who had made her acquaintance on
one of his ocean cruises. To us, physicists of a later gen-
eration, it gave a peculiar thrill to hear Mr. Grabham
speak of our demi-god, Lord Kelvin, greatest of all
nineteenth-century physicists, as " Uncle Willy." He
also showed us, in the harbor of Funchal, the remnants
of the first tidal gauge which Lord Kelvin had built
there in order to pursue his pioneer work on the ocean
tides. It was in Mr. Grabham's delightful old garden
that we saw the tulip tree planted by Captain Cook, and
also made the acquaintance of the famous dragon tree,
indigenous to Madeira and the Canary Islands.
We also had the privilege of visiting a still more mag-
nificent garden, high up in the hills, belonging to the
present head of the house of Blandy. Nearly two cen-
turies ago, the founder of the house saved this unique
botanical garden, planted by an eccentric Portuguese
count, from being cut down by its owner, who had
ruined himself by living not wisely but too well. It is
said to contain no less than eight hundred different trees
from South America, South Africa, The Himalaya, etc.,
many of them of giant growth. The number of Camellia
bushes unfortunately not in flower at the time of our
46 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
visitruns into tens of thousands. Our eyes were de-
lighted by acres upon acres of agapanthus, blue and
white, of which Mrs. Blandy presented us with two enor-
mous bunches. She also gave us a basket full of delicious
plums, before we were driven back in a luxurious car
down the steep road leading to Funchal.
Before leaving the enchanted garden, we were taken
into an old rococo building, now used for storing fruit,
where the spendthrift count had lived. Exquisite deco-
rations were still visible on the walls. One could well
imagine them as a background for stately minuets and
graceful gavottes, trod to Couperin's music by the gay
guests of an Almaviva, who wasted his substance on
wine, women and song.
One of the many sights of Funchal is its new market,
with an overwhelming abundance of flowers, fruits and
berries from strawberries and aromatic silver bananas
to grapes, which were just then coming in. To us stran-
gers from the frugal North, the prices seemed incredibly
low. In the adjacent fish-market there was a deafening
noise from swarthy fish-vendors, loudly crying out their
wares. Large chunks of blood-red tunnies, the "oxen of
the sea," were cut up for sale, and we were also offered
strange-looking inhabitants of the great depths, like the
ugly but palatable scabbard fish. It somewhat resembles
an eel, but has an enormous mouth, and bears a rather
terrifying pattern of black and white. The upwelling
waters around the island make these and other rarities
of the great deep accessible to the nets and hooks of the
fisher-folk.
Before we left Funchal with our big winch readjusted,
our Captain invited some of our Madeira friends for a
real Swedish dinner on board. Our ice-cold beer and
the Swedish Schnapps, drunk with hors-d'oeuvres to
EMERALD OF THE ATLANTIC OCEAN 47
melodious drinking songs, were highly appreciated by
our guests. In parting, Mr. Grabham gave me a unique
present, a bottle of old Madeira which had been given
to the Challenger Expedition on their first visit to
Funchal, and was carried around the world on their
cruise. A few of the remaining bottles had been re-
turned to the donors on the second visit, in memory of
the cruise. It was given to me on the express condition
that it was not to be consumed before it had been a
second time around the world, on the Albatross, a con-
dition which was faithfully observed. 1
With feelings of deep gratitude, mingled with regret
at leaving this wonderful island and the charming
friends we had found there, we set out to continue our
voyage. A gentle trade wind filled our sails. Brilliant
sunshine played over the waves by day, and silvery
moonlight by night, as we drew farther away from Eu-
rope, heading for another jewel of the Atlantic Ocean,
the pearl of the West Indies, Martinique.
1 The Challenger Madeira was consumed during our visit to London
in September 1948. Among the guests who shared the bottle were two
British admirals, the Deputy Master of Trinity House, the Chief of the
Discovery Department of the Colonial Office, and the Director of the
Swedish Institute in London, worthy recipients of the unique wine,
which had twice made its world tour, first with H.M.S. Challenger,
and three-quarters of a century later with the Albatross.
Chapter 5
CROSSING THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
It is a wonderfully clear morning far out on the Atlantic
Ocean. Straight ahead the full moon is sinking into the
sea, and the silver bridge it spreads before us is rapidly
waning before the first rays from the sun rising in our
wake. Suddenly, just under the bows of the Albatross,
swarms of flying fish, the glittering dragonflies of the
tropical sea, are scared out of the water by that strange
giant fish which seems to pursue them. They are masters
of soaring flight, these beautiful creatures. Time after
time they barely touch the surface, gathering impetus
for continued flight by means of their rapidly vibrating
tail fins.
Since 2 A.M. I have been watching the recording echo-
sounder, magically drawing the profile of the ocean bot-
tom many thousands of feet below our keel. Far down
in the hull of the ship there is a bundle of nickel plates
vibrating 10,000 times per second under the influence
of a strong magnetic field varying with the same fre-
quency. Short pulses of these ultrasonic waves, concen-
trated downward by a reflector behind the vibrator, are
passing out into the water through a thin membrane of
PLATE 3
THE LONG CORING TUBE
PREPARED FOR LOWER-
ING
THE CORER IN DESCENT
PLATE 4
TAKING THE CORER ON
BOARD
KULLENBERG AND JONASSON
TAKING OUT A CORE
PLATE 4A
PUSHING OUT THE INNER TUBE
J. Eriksson
J. Eriksson
ARRHENIUS STUDYING THE CONTENTS OF THE CORER
PLATE 5
A'. Pettersson
DR. ERICSSON WITH PHOTO-MINDED NEGRO CHILDREN
MONT PELEE
CROSSING THE ATLANTIC OCEAN 49
steel. Their echo from the sea floor returns to the ship
and enters through another steel membrane, reaching
an electric receiver. From there the ultrasonic waves,
transformed into electric impulses, are conducted to the
echo-graph in the laboratory. The moments of the emis-
sion and of the reception of each pulse are recorded on a
chemically-treated strip of paper slowly rotated by an
electric motor. Thus, from a sequence of small points, a
curve appears which, on a reduced scale, shows how the
bottom rises and falls along the course we are following.
Since the velocity of sound waves in water is about
5000 feet per second, only a few seconds are required
for the pulses emitted to reach the ocean bed and be re-
flected back to our receiver. Multiplying the "echo-time"
by 5000, therefore, gives the total distance which the
ultrasonic impulses have traversed, which is twice the
actual depth. The earlier "mechanical" sounding tech-
niqueusing a lead lowered to the bottom, the length
of its steel wire giving a measure of the depth took sev-
eral hours to make a single sounding at a depth of, say,
3000 fathoms. With no physical contact, the echo-graph
achieves the same purpose in a fraction of a minute and
is, moreover, capable of repeating the sounding continu-
ously at intervals of a few seconds.
It is most fascinating to watch the ocean bottom
drawing its own profile by means of this marvel of
engineering while our ship pursues its course at a speed
of eight to nine knots. Using the highest sensitivity
afforded by our echo-graph, we can note changes in
depth as small as one to two fathoms. Yet even this
splendid instrument has its limitations. With a contrary
wind or swell, air bubbles are apt to get below the bot-
tom of the ship, dissipating the energy of the ultrasonic
beam and making the echo-grams indistinct or even
50 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
illegible. Fortunately, we run before the wind for most
of the time on our westerly course and the swell is mod-
erate, so that the depth records are generally clear.
A few decades ago, when only a sparse net of
mechanical soundings was available, one had the general
impression that the deep-sea floor was a gigantic plain
and that its depth varied only very little over great dis-
tances. This view is proved erroneous by a look at our
echo-grams taken between Madeira and Martinique.
The bottom profile rises or falls quite often by "steps,"
a mile or two across and tens if not hundreds of fathoms
high. This gives the impression of passing across what
land geologists call scarps. In other places the ocean floor
is covered with small hills or hummocks, so that the pro-
file drawn is not simple but dissolves into stars made by
intersecting lines.
This remarkable ruggedness of the deep ocean floor
is of interest from a structural or "morphological" point
of view. It also presents serious complications in our
work, especially with the long and rather fragile core-
samplers. When lowered against a steep slope on the
bottom, they may topple over and become bent or even
broken. Also, in measuring the thickness of the sediment
carpet by Weibull's method of exploding depth-charges,
the multiple echoes from the explosion thrown back
from the hills and hummocks on the sea floor may often
obscure the fainter echoes reflected by deep interfaces
within the sediment, or by the surface of the rock-bed
beneath it.
Hence the records of the echo-sounder must be con-
sulted before the ship is laid-to for work, so as to avoid
areas where the profile is not sufficiently smooth. Where
a reasonably smooth sea is found, however, operations
may begin. The ship is headed into the wind and kept
CROSSING THE ATLANTIC OCEAN 51
immobile by the engine. The long corer is lifted from
its horizontal position along the bulwark on the upper
deck and brought forward to the deep-sea winch. This
is set in motion, lowering the corer rapidly to the bot-
tom after the necessary number of extra weights have
been added. At the last moment, before sending the
corer down, the release is made ready so that it will
automatically go into action the moment the sea floor is
reached. This is the critical moment, when the utmost
care is required on the part of the man directing the
coring operation, so that the big winch can be stopped
dead just as the reduced strain on the dynamometer over
which the wire is running out indicates that the release
has been set into operation. In a few seconds the entire
length of the coring-tube, which may be varied accord-
ing to the weather, the depth and bottom conditions
(from 20 to 60 feet or even more), has been plunged
into the sediment. The piston inside remains stationary
in contact with the sediment, while the coring-tube de-
scends, forcing a column of sediment to rise upward,
filling the thin lining-tubes inside the external heavy
steel tube. Then the winch is set to raise the load. After
the resistance of the corer sticking in the surrounding
sediment has been overcome, the instrument with its
precious content can be raised to the surface and put
along the bulwark on the upper deck. The sections of
lining-tubes, each 28 inches long, are pushed out of the
steel tube and brought down into the sediment labora-
tory. There the deposit is examined and carefully
packed.
Thanks to the excellent technique developed by Dr.
Kullenberg, an entire coring operation down to a depth
of 3000 fathoms could, under favorable conditions, be
carried out in a little more than three hours. The scru-
52 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
tiny of the cores conducted by our geologist, Dr. G.
Arrhenius, with the ship's doctor as chief helper, took a
couple of hours. Finally, packing the core sections in
plastic, and enclosing them in aluminum tubes with the
residual space filled up with molten paraffin, making
them ready for cool storage, took another couple of
hours. Because of this time element, we did not often
raise more than one or two cores per day from great
depths. Nearer the coastline and in shallower depths,
especially in the Mediterranean, the number was occa-
sionally increased to three or even four.
After concluding a coring operation, the depth-
charges were made ready and the hydrophones by which
the different echoes were recordedeither by photo-
graphic registering on an oscillograph or by wire-re-
corderwere hung over the side of the ship. Generally
two depth-charges were dropped, one for explosion in
moderate depths, 300 to 1400 fathoms, and one for
depths of 2500 up to 3500 fathoms. By pressing an ear
to the bulwark, one could feel the thud from the explo-
sions which occurred several minutes after the charges
had been dropped. The fainter echoes, thrown back by
deeper reflecting surfaces in the sediment, were dis-
cernible only by means of the recording instruments.
The very deepest echoes detected by Weibull during
our first Atlantic crossing indicated a reflecting surface
some 12,000 feet below the bottom itself. If we assume
the whole of the sediment there to be identical with the
red clay found in the upper layers, and allow a rate of
accumulation of one-fourth inch per thousand years, the
total time of accumulation would be some five hundred
million years. If we also take into account the compact-
ing effect in the lower layers of sediment, the total time
of deposition must be increased considerably.
CROSSING THE ATLANTIC OCEAN 53
This result is rather startling; it implies a striking
contradiction to the much debated theory of continental
Fig. 6. Simplified bathymetric chart
of the Atlantic Ocean.
drift, expounded by the Austrian geophysicist Wegener.
According to him, the Atlantic Ocean is of relatively
late origin, being formed about seventy million years
54 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
ago, at which time the two Americas drifted away from
the Old World. Our results showed, however, that at
least that part of the Atlantic Ocean where Weibull
found his peak value for the thickness of sediment must
be many times older than the age ascribed to it by
Wegener.
A simplified bathymetric chart of the Atlantic Ocean
is reproduced in Fig. 6, with the depth-line for 4000
meters (about 2200 fathoms) indicated. This contour is
seen to enclose a remarkable submarine mountain
chain, the "Central Atlantic Ridge," stretching from far
north of the Azores down to the latitude of Cape Horn.
This ridge separates the deep Atlantic basin into two
"Atlantic Valleys" with depths exceeding 2500 fathoms.
A transverse submarine ridge appears to stretch almost
at right angles to the Ridge, from Tristan da Cunha to-
ward Walvis Bay on the coast of southwest Africa. It
serves as a submarine dike, obstructing the passage of
the ice-cold Antarctic bottom water from the south into
the eastern Atlantic Valley.
Should the pessimistic views of certain geologists be
realized that a progressive desiccation of our planet
will lead to a gradual sinking of the ocean surface a
mid-Atlantic continent, separating two Atlantic Oceans
from each other, will ultimately emerge above the fall-
ing sea surface. To what complications in international
politics the ownership of this new continent may lead
must be left to the imagination.
According to Wegener, the Central Atlantic Ridge is
a kind of "birth scar" left behind on the ocean floor
when the Old and the New Worlds drifted apart. How-
ever, geological evidence found in the last thirty years
indicates that the Ridge is probably built up by exten-
sive submarine volcanic action, i.e. by molten magma
GROSSING THE ATLANTIC OCEAN 55
from deeper layers in the crust being extruded through
an enormously long fissure in the bed of the Atlantic.
The fact that the few mid-oceanic islands of the Atlan-
tic, which rise up from the Ridge, carry active or extinct
volcanoes certainly favors this explanation. Other ex-
amples of the important part submarine volcanism must
have played in the development o the two other oceans
will be seen in the following pages.
Some results obtained by our splendid echo-graphs
are of general interest. We were unable to find any con-
firmation of the existence of the so-called "Fosse de
Monaco" with a depth of more than 3400 fathoms in
lat. 3055'N., long. 2525'W.; we found the depth there
to be 250 fathoms less. On the other hand, a still greater,
hitherto apparently unrecorded, depth of over 3500
fathoms was encountered farther to the southwest in lat.
25io'N., long. 363o'W. When we passed across the
Central Atlantic Ridge, our echo-graph indicated an
unrecorded minimum depth of not quite 800 fathoms in
lat. 23oo / N., long. 45 i i'W. The Admiralty charts have
no similar depth in the vicinity, where 1300 fathoms ap-
pears as the minimum.
Here we seem to have hit on the highest point of the
Central Ridge between St. Paul's Rocks and the Azores.
In the event of a progressive sinking of the ocean sur-
face, as has been suggested, this point would be the first
to protrude. Modesty forbids us to suggest that it should
in that remote time be called "Albatross Island. 1 '
The color of the sediment cores taken during this
cruise varied from the chocolate brown of the red clay
characteristic of great depths to the nearly white shades
of calcareous sediment, the "globigerina ooze," charac-
teristic of moderate depths near the Central Ridge. On
its western side, however, in greater depths traversed
56 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
before we reached the West Indies, the color of the sedi-
ment again reverted to chocolate brown, indicating a
scarcity of lime.
Being anxious to pass through the Caribbean Sea be-
fore the height of the hurricane season, we had to cut
short our program of work during the first Atlantic
crossing. We consoled ourselves with the prospect of de-
voting more time to that part of the ocean on our return
voyage, and therefore with a clear conscience headed for
Martinique.
Chapter 6
IN THE HURRICANE REGION
Like a garland of tropical flowers set in an azure sea, the
West Indian islands form a barricade against the Atlan-
tic Ocean. Their apparent peacefulness is deceptive, for
they are frequently disturbed by demoniac forces. The
mighty fold of the Earth's crust which supports the
Antilles is under a terrific strain, a strain which often
becomes manifest through destructive earthquakes or
volcanic eruptions. Measurements of the gravitational
force made in submerged submarines by a method we
owe to the Dutch scientist Vening-Meinez prove that
these forces have large local variations from their nor-
mal value, both to the positive and to the negative side.
Such anomalies give a foreboding of still greater dis-
turbance in the future. Some geologists assert that the
accumulation of deposits in the deep downward fold
running parallel to the island-festoon is heaping up
material for an unborn mountain chain predestined to
be raised high above the ocean surface, just as the Euro-
pean Alps were raised thirty to sixty million years ago.
The same hypothesis has been propounded also with
regard to a similar deep trough encircling the East
57
58 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
Indian islands. Perhaps the paroxysms which occasion-
ally shake the very foundations of both these vast archi-
pelagos are early forerunners of the birth-pains of a
tremendous mountain-building process, which will
shake the world millions of years after our time.
Quite a different kind of catastrophe is that caused by
the intensely concentrated atmospheric disturbances
sweeping over the islands tropical storms or hurricanes.
Late summer and early autumn is the high season of
these dancing dervishes of the air, which we are anxious
to avoid. Hence the timing of our itinerary aiming at a
safe passage through the Caribbean Sea. The Albatross
is a sturdy ship capable of weathering a tropical storm.
But the tumultuous waves accompanying such a storm
and creating a powerful ocean-swell hundreds of miles
from the storm center would, for several days, make all
work on board impossible. So we had to push ahead,
strictly limiting our work en route, no matter how
tempting an investigation of the deep basins we were
passing appeared to us.
Approaching Martinique from the northeast, one is
struck by the multitude of volcanic cones jutting up
from the shore. They rise highest in the north with the
sinister peak of Mt. Pelee, the cause of a terrific holo-
caust in May 1902. The top of the volcano was blown
off, a rift in its side opened, and a blast of hot magmatic
gas a nuee ardente as the French say swept down the
slopes, annihilating all life in its way. The flourishing
city of St. Pierre at its foot was totally destroyed and its
28,000 inhabitants were killed in the course of a few
minutes.
Proceeding southward along the west coast of the
island, one finds the contours tamer until the idyllic
harbor of Fort-de-France is reached. Here our American
IN THE HURRICANE REGION 59
guest, Dr. Phleger of the Scripps Oceanographic Insti-
tute in La Jolla who was to accompany us across the
Caribbean was waiting for us. He is a specialist on
foraminifera plankton living in the tropical and sub-
tropical ocean surface and spreading their tiny calcare-
ous shells in enormous numbers over the ocean floor.
Phleger was given the highest priority by the U.S. Navy
for his flying tour to Martinique in order to join the Al-
batross cruise. His host in Fort-de-France, the U.S. Con-
sul, Mr. Hunt, also took us under his wing. Mr. and
Mrs. Hunt received us in their home with the hospital-
ity shown by all American and British officials we met
during our expedition.
To us northerners, the splendor of tropical vegetation
is almost overwhelming. Then, too, there is the great
variety of human beings, the products of centuries of
interracial crossing. Every shade of color from cafd au
lait to black is represented, with a decided predomi-
nance of the darker shades. Europeans are relatively
scarce in the streets of Fort-de-France. In spite of appar-
ent poverty, the native population wear grins of friend-
liness and contentment. Beggars are fewer and far less
aggressive than those one meets in the south of Europe.
We were invited to dine with the Hunts, and were
treated to a variety of local delicacies. Afterward, in the
cool of the evening in their spacious garden, there was
musical entertainment Swedish folk songs and Tahitian
chants sung by a French naval officer and his wife who
had spent some years in Papeete. These were inter-
spersed with American college songs. The accompani-
ment, by an orchestra of tropical insects hidden in the
surrounding trees and bushes, sometimes rose to a deaf-
ening fortissimo.
The season of the notorious tropical storms was just
6o WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
beginning. They are most frequent at the end of August,
in September, and at the beginning of October. For the
West Indian islands they are a terrible scourge. Accord-
ing to statistics extending over more than two hundred
years, Martinique has been struck between eight and ten
times in each century. During the hours when the at-
mospheric madness is at its height, damage is wrought
amounting to many millions of dollars. Houses, factories
and churches collapse, and the growing crops of corn
and sugar-cane are destroyed, causing famine for men
and cattle. Thousands of human lives are sometimes
lost.
Modern meteorological research has located the origin
of the West Indian cyclones on the borderline between
the equatorial calm and the trade winds. In a similar
way the miniature cyclones of Scandinavia, the trombs,
are generated along the borderline between two air-cur-
rents of opposite direction. Once started, the "dancing
dervishes" of the tropics follow a curved path, at first to
the west, then turning to the north, sometimes even to
the northeast. The speed at which they travel is much
lower than the wind velocity at the center, which may
exceed a hundred miles per hour.
There are many signs giving warning of the approach
of a tropical storm; a veil of thin cirrus clouds spreading
over the sky, the lower clouds travelling at high speed,
a sudden drop of the barometer, and, especially with
slowly travelling hurricanes, a high swell coming from
the direction of the storm center. Nowadays, thanks to
radar, it is possible to view from a considerable distance
the intense water condensation which occurs. Intrepid
air pilots of the U.S. Navy have repeatedly flown their
planes right through the atmospheric vortex and, in
spite of a fierce knocking about by blasts and counter-
IN THE HURRICANE REGION 6l
blasts, have made valuable observations on the structure
of the air masses gyrating around the center of the
storm. During the hurricane season a close watch is kept
over the breeding-ground of the storms. Once on the
move, their probable path is plotted and radioed to a
number of meteorological stations, warning the inhabi-
tants of approaching disaster.
Another kind of destructive force which from time to
time threatens the peace of the Antilles is subterranean
in source. The earliest eruption of Mt. Pelee on record
was that of 1792, repeated, after more than half a cen-
tury of repose, in 1851. After another respite of fifty
years came the devastating outbreak of 1902 already
mentioned. The year 1902 was critical also for other
volcanoes in the Central American region. On April
17th the volcano Quetzatlenango in Guatemala had a
violent eruption which coincided with a minor outbreak
of Mt. Pelee, a forerunner of the catastrophe on May
8th. On the preceding day, the Soufrire on the island
of St. Vincent had gone into action, and on May loth
Izalco in San Salvador broke into eruption. There are
many other examples of similar interconnection be-
tween volcanoes situated in the same region.
We seized the opportunity of our visit to Fort-de-
France to make an excursion on Mt. Pelee. Through a
landscape where wild volcanic rocks provided a somber
background for lovely tropical vegetation, with scarlet
hibiscus and lily-white fleurs soleil, we were taken by car
toward the volcano. When the radiators of the cars be-
gan to boil on the steep grade, our Negro chauffeurs
refused to take us farther and we had to continue our
ascent toward the crater on foot. Unfortunately its sum-
mit was lost in a dense fog, which made most of us give
62 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
up climbing to the top. On a clear day the view from
the crater rim must be magnificent.
Lovely and alluring is the Pearl of the Antilles, as
lovely as its most famous daughter, Napoleon's Empress
Josephine. A prolonged stay in its warm, moist air is
bound to have a deteriorating effect on men from the
north. It was in fact with relief that we headed west-
ward from hospitable Fort-de-France, with its venerable
fortress.
The bottom of the Caribbean Sea is a tempting field
of work for students of the deep sea. Its contour is most
varied. Deep troughs alternate with submarine ridges,
and the sediments carpeting the underlying rock-bed
are most interesting. We should have loved to criss-cross
over this lunar seascape, studying the bottom profile
with our echo-graph, measuring the sediment carpet
with our exploding depth-charges, and raising long cores
from depths almost untouched by science. However, we
still had three oceans to investigate within the limited
time at our disposal, and therefore had to hurry on to-
ward Panama and the great Pacific beyond it.
Our American guest, Dr. Phleger, was intent on ex-
amining the small foraminifera germinating in the
surface waters, and also their tiny calcareous shells on
the bottom. He had brought on board an ingenious set
of tow-nets, which could be attached to our instrument
line, for sampling the minute plankton organisms at
different depths. By far the greatest number of the
foraminifera are pelagic, i.e. they drift along with the
currents in the upper layers, whereas a much smaller
number prefer a more sedate existence as benthos, liv-
ing on the bottom.
The pelagic foraminifera in which we were mainly
interested comprise well over a score of different spe-
IN THE HURRICANE REGION 6g
cies, recognizable by the characteristic shapes of their
shells. Some of them, such as Globorotalia meinardii,
are sensitive to cold and are therefore confined to the
warm surface water of tropical seas, whereas others are
more hardy, like the dominant species Globigerina bul-
loides, and are able to spread to higher latitudes where
the surface is cooler.
Geology teaches us that after untold millions of years
of warm climate, when polar ice-caps were absent, a
deterioration of climate occurred at the end of the Ter-
tiary Age. During the past million years of the Earth's
history the Quaternary Agethe climate of the world
became so severe for long spells that vast masses of in-
land ice spread over the continents in the higher lati-
tudes. The present ice-caps over Greenland and the
Antarctic are much reduced remnants of the ice ages.
The cooling influence of the vast inland ice and of the
Arctic and Antarctic sea ice reduced the surface temper-
ature of the ocean down to the Equator and severely
restricted its population of heat-loving foraminifera.
During intervals of warmer climate, the so-called * 'inter-
glacials/' they again increased in number. The relative
abundance or scarcity of their shells at different levels
of the sediment cores therefore represents a kind of
temperature record of the Quaternary Age, which can
be deciphered by an analysis of the calcareous shells.
Through a biological analysis of the relatively short
sediment cores raised from the bottom of the equatorial
Atlantic Ocean by the Meteor Expedition, the German
specialist Professor W. Schott discovered a level about
ten inches below the sediment surface where the warm
water forms, Globorotalia meinardii, became very
scarce. At a somewhat deeper level this form again
turned up. Schott inferred that the upper limit marked
64 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
the end of the last glaciation, some twenty thousand
years ago, and that the lower limit corresponded to the
end of the preceding interglacial period. Similar results
have since been obtained by other workers, affording a
means for linking submarine geochronology with that
evolved for the continents by glaciologists.
Dr. Phleger had already done us the great service of
analyzing cores raised in 1946 from the depths of the
Tyrrhenian Sea by the Skagerak. He had also found
there unmistakable signs of climatic variations affecting
the composition of the foraminifera assemblage. He now
had an opportunity of sampling our longest core from
the Caribbean Sea, raised from a depth of 2700 fathoms,
samples of which he took back for analysis to the Scripps
Institute of Oceanography at La Jolla. Before the Alba-
tross had returned from her cruise around the world,
Phleger had results ready for publication. A summary is
reproduced in Fig. 7.
The graph shows how warm and cold periods, indi-
cated by the shells of foraminifera, varied with the dis-
tance below the sediment surface (given in centimeters
at the left-hand side of the graph). The variations found
are highly significant, and show cold periods (shaded in
the graph) corresponding to the four main periods of
glaciation over North America as set out in the right-
hand side of the graph. This latter addition to the dia-
gram is the work of an eminent English specialist on
foraminifera and their relation to climate, Mr. Cameron
Ovey of the British Museum (Natural History) in Lon-
don. The connection cannot as yet be considered defi-
nite. Still, it shows what intensely interesting results can
be derived from collaboration between oceanographers,
climatologists and specialists on micropalaeontology.
Assuming for the present that the interrelation dem-
PLATE 6
DR. FRED PHLEGER AND HIS PLANKTON SAMPLERS
FORAMINIFERA X 20
PLATE 7
GOING ASHORE
TO A PECULIAR ISLAND (JAMESON'S STRAND)
J. Eriksson
PLATE 8
A DRAGON ON JAMES'
ISLAND
THE AUTHOR WITH
A LITTLE OWL
PLATE 9
THE LARGE RING-NET
TOWING THE RING-NET ON
THE SURFACE
IN THE HURRICANE REGION 65
onstrated by the graph will be substantiated by current
investigations, one obtains a rough estimate of the total
TROPICAL WARM
COLD ARCTIC
DEPTH
I CM
too
100
300
4OO
500
too
7OO
eoo
9OO
IOOO
1100
1200
1300
MOO
1500
1540
GLACIAL A
INTERGLAGAl
EPOCHS
WISCONSIN
457CM JRO
INTERGLACIAt
ILLINOIAN
2ND
INTERGLAOAl
980 CM.
KANSAS
1143 CM T
INTERGLACIAl
1 359 CM
[ NEBRASKA
Fig. 7. Succession of climatic periods as shown by Foraminifera.
length of time required for accumulating the 50 feet of
sediment thickness represented by the core. It is about
six hundred thousand years. This would mean a rate of
accumulation of one foot in forty thousand years, or an
66 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
increase in the thickness of the sediment carpet of one
inch in one thousand years, a reasonable supposition.
We did not altogether escape the hurricanes. During
the latter part of our cruise in the Caribbean we were
chased by the forerunners of a cyclone. Fortunately the
storm center had the good sense to follow a more north-
erly direction, and from there sent us, as an envoy, a
heavy swell. And we had other unforeseen mishaps im-
peding our work. Our big winch failed us, so that we
had to give up further soundings for cores until we
could have it readjusted in Cristobal. Thanks to the
helpfulness of the high command of the U.S. Navy in
the Canal Zone, the work required was carried out both
efficiently and quickly in their workshops. Moreover,
the work done there cured the winch definitely of most
of its ailments, although it still required very strict
supervision by Kullenberg and Jonasson and cost us
many anxious moments.
With a load off our minds and with great expecta-
tions, we passed through the Panama Canal and set our
course from Balboa into the great Pacific, heading for
the famous "Enchanted Isles" of the Galapagos group.
Chapter 7
THE ISLES OF ETERNAL SPRING
Right on the Equator, in the middle of the tropical
zone, where the sun at noon pours down a vertical tor-
rent of flaming heat, one finds the Enchanted Isles.
There, by a freak of nature, a spring-like coolness pre-
vails, as on a sunny day in May in far-off Sweden. The
cause of this mild temperature is the ocean, or rather
the cool water which rises to the surface to the south
of the Galapagos group, raised by the mighty sweep of
the Humboldt Current. This upwelling water is rich in
nutrient salts which give rise to an abundance of marine
life, plankton organisms, fish, sea-birds and even sea
lions, lavishly nourished by the bounties of the ocean.
The giant tortoises, laying their eggs on the sandy
beaches of the islands, are now almost exterminated. In
bygone centuries they made the group a favorite resort
of the desperadoes of the high seas, the wild buccaneers.
These loyal pirates named the different islands after
members or retainers of the Royal House of Stuart.
From this base the terrible Morgan set out on his
cruises, ravaging the prosperous city of old Panama and
laying waste other harbors along the isthmus. Some cen-
68 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
turies before him an intrepid seafarer among the Incas
of Peru, called Yupangui, is believed to have reached
the islands in a primitive ship. He described "moun-
tains in flames/' probably identical with the volcanoes
of the Galapagos Islands, some of which have been active
quite recently.
We of the Swedish Deep-Sea Expedition had been
charged by our specialist on the Pacific islands flora, Pro-
fessor Skottsberg of Goteborg, to send a landing party
ashore on one of the islands. He would have preferred
the largest of the whole group, Albemarle, where he
wanted us to collect indigenous plants high up on the
hills. Meanwhile the Albatross was to work to the south
of the islands, investigating the upwelling water, its
myriads of plankton and the deposits on the bottom.
Our first call was on the southwestern island, Chat-
ham, where we had to report to the Ecuadorian authori-
ties. They were represented by a pleasant and rather shy
young officer, Teniente de Fragata, who had recently
taken charge of the score of soldiers stationed there. He
readily gave us permission to spend several days on the
uninhabited James Island, but warned us not to make
any landing on Albemarle. This island was then occu-
pied by deported criminals, of which some were notori-
ous desperadoes from the mainland. They were expected
to cut each others' throats in the course of about two or
three years; until then the island was not considered a
healthy spot for peaceful visitors. The American natu-
ralist and author, Ainslie Conway, whom we had the
great luck to meet on Chatham, warned us in still more
emphatic terms to leave Albemarle alone. With Mrs.
Conway, he had spent several years in the Galapagos,
beginning with James Island and then settling on Flor-
eana. After World War II the Conways had returned to
THE ISLE OF ETERNAL SPRING 69
James Island, until they were evacuated to Chatham by
order of the Ecuadorian authorities. The official reason
given was that they were in imminent danger of having
their throats cut by visitors from Albemarle. Conway
himself scoffed at the idea and strongly encouraged us
to visit James Island, the peculiar charm of which had
completely captivated him.
Besides excellent information and advice, the Con-
ways presented us with oranges of rare fragrancy, grown
on Chatham. Teniente de Fragata, who had evidently
been flattered by the snapshots we had taken o him and
his awe-inspiring guard, gave me a few delicious pine-
apples grown in the interior of the island. We also pho-
tographed him against a memorial bust of the great
Charles Darwin. The Darwin Society of London had
recently set it up in commemoration of the young Dar-
win's famous visit to the Galapagos group in the Beagle
in 1835.
The shores and the lower levels of the islands suffer
from regular droughts, and are almost desert-like. On
the hill tops and the hill slopes there is more rain, which
supports a not-too-abundant vegetation. Our visit hap-
pened to coincide with the height of the dry season,
when the cold, upwelling water has its greatest effect.
The surface temperature is then reduced to 60 F., or
even less, as compared with 80 F. or more prevailing in
the surface of the equatorial seas. Consequently much
of the vegetation was dormant, the rest being scantily
supplied with moisture from wet nocturnal fogs, known
as garua. From a botanical point of view our visit was,
therefore, not fortunately timed. But this adverse cir-
cumstance did not prevent the leader of our landing
party, Dr. Eriksson, from getting a fair collection of rare
Galapagos plants.
7O WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
Early on a September morning, five of us were put
ashore from the Albatross motor-launch in the James
Bight on the southern side of the island. Pitch-black
lava rocks alternated with beaches of snow-white sand.
Numerous scarlet spots scattered over the rocks turned
out to be large crabs, Grapsus grapsus, which, at our
approach, fled with incredible swiftness into crevasses
and holes in the lava. Basking in the sun were lazy
though formidable-looking sea lizards; they resembled
dragons pictured in fairy tales. A sea lion, startled from
his siesta, slid out of a cave and regarded us with aston-
ished eyes.
We soon found the deserted site of Conway's former
house. It took considerably more time to find our way
to their freshwater spring, the only water supply on the
island during the rainless season. Our walk there over
sand and gravel, alternating with a natural pavement
of hard volcanic tuff, and with the mighty "Sugarloaf '
as a background, had an indescribable charm. Scattered
trees with white twigs reminded us of a Swedish orchard
in early spring, when lime is used to prevent ravages by
the "frost butterfly." Between the trees were green
shrubs, miraculously in flower, and fine-leaved acacias
in which small birds were singing jubilantly.
The fearlessness of the birds was remarkable. We had
many occasions for surprises of this kind during our
visit to James Island. The small finches Darwin de-
scribed, with beaks of varying size and shape, with
plumes of different shades from light gray to black, were
among the boldest. Sometimes an inquisitive finch
perched on one's shoulder and started a twittering con-
versation. Perfectly delightful were the small Galapagos
doves with rose-colored breasts, coral-red feet and tur-
quoise rings around their eyes. They crowded about us,
THE ISLE OF ETERNAL SPRING 71
especially on our visits to the spring, which we kept
well covered, when not in use, with a sheet of corrugated
iron as a protection against wild goats and asses. As soon
as the birds saw us approach the water, they came in
flocks for a drink and a bath. We obliged them as far as
we considered compatible with the strict economy we
had to observe in using the precious water.
Our five days on James Island were the thirstiest I
have ever spent. Fetching our daily supply of water to
our distant camp from Conway's spring was quite a
strenuous undertaking.
Soon we were ready to march with our kit, including
tents, hammocks, clothes, guns, cameras, cooking-gear,
provisions and water, toward the foot of the northern
hills, where our base camp was pitched. Conway had
warned us against the intervening river of pahoehoe
lava, which we had to traverse, and which he described
as perfectly awful.
Our first encounter with this volcanic product was
disheartening. It resembled a choppy sea suddenly trans-
formed into black and very brittle stone with a curiously
twisted and distorted surface. Where blocks had broken
loose, or where a crevasse had opened, the color of the
lower layers varied from soot-black through a dirty
brownish yellow to a color reminding one unpleasantly
of putrefying flesh. The worst of it was that the lava
fragments, sharp-edged like crushed glass, cut into the
soles of our sturdy boots and reduced our rate of prog-
ress to intolerable slowness. Add to this a vertical flood
of pitiless sunlight, burning neck and shoulders, which
were weighted down by our heavy marching-kit. As one
of the party remarked, the ghastly lava river gave the
impression that here the devil must have been making
taffy for his offspring and had allowed the pot to boil
72 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
over. Nearly exhausted, we finally reached the opposite
shore of the lava stream. There we slung our hammocks
from trees growing close to a miniature crater. Its jagged
crests were crowned with giant Opuntias, the cacti char-
acteristic of the Galapagos Islands. In a narrow cleft we
discovered a dainty little owl. In spite of its protests, it
was removed to the light of day and made to pose before
the camera, after which it was set free. We considered
the incident closed, but not so the owl. Later in the
evening, as we were cooking our supper on an impro-
vised grate built from lava rocks, the owl paid us a
return visit. He flew away but soon returned with a
second little owl, and both stayed quite close to us,
obviously deeply interested in our culinary preparations.
Three of us devoted the following day to collecting
plants and taking photographs. Meanwhile the two
young apprentices from the Albatross were sent back
over the lava river to fetch more water from the spring.
We who took the opposite direction toward the hills
were at first delighted with the agreeable flatness of the
ground. Numerous wild asses and goats fled at our ap-
proach and we almost stumbled over a great sow. Sur-
rounded by her numerous offspring, she grunted her
strong disapproval at being disturbed, and, with them,
promptly disappeared into the thicket. Much less shy
than these wild descendants of domestic animals were
two large birds of prey. They were magnificent Gala-
pagos buzzards, one of them very dark, the other a
speckled brown. They followed us from tree to tree
during our wanderings and cheerfully posed before the
cameras. When I took the liberty of poking one of them
in the chest with a long stick, he suffered it patiently;
afterward he carefully rearranged his ruffled feathers
without moving from his perch.
THE ISLE OF ETERNAL SPRING 73
During our climb up the steep hillside we came on
the roughest ground I have ever met: a very steep slope
with scattered lava blocks, treacherously giving way
under our feet, slippery stems of fallen trees and prickly
shrubs, which made the climb strenuous in the extreme.
Finally we reached the summit and were rewarded by a
magnificent view of the nearest islands. Albemarle,
shifting in color from rose to black and, further to the
south, Indefatigable Island, just visible as a blue shade
on the glittering sea. By contrast, the landscape imme-
diately before us was decidedly sinister. The dark lava
river in all its horror cut a broad streak across the sur-
rounding brushwood and the scanty verdure. On its
other side a grayish-red crater rose abruptly skyward.
Afterward we found that it contained a small lake of salt
brine surrounded by brilliantly green succulent herbs.
The view before us made an unforgettable picture of
blue sea, black volcanic wilderness and early spring
charm.
The following day my son and I volunteered as water-
carriers. I was imprudent enough to go around the
"Sugarloaf" on the land side, grossly underestimating
the distance we had to walk. Several hours later than I
expected we arrived with parched throats at Conway's
spring, drank our fill and replenished our water-bottles.
In our absence our comrades collected botanical speci-
mens and tried their luck at shooting wild pigs. They
bagged a sow and two suckling pigs. One of the latter
was roasted on a spit over the fire, and was consumed
with relish.
Our last day on James Island we devoted to our
friends the sea lions. They were enjoying their siesta on
shelves of lava rocks overhanging the water. Deep clefts
filled with emerald-green sea-water, spanned by natural
74 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
bridges of lava, ran in from the shore. The ocean swell
thundered in and out through subterranean channels.
By friendly prodding we convinced the sleepy sea lions
that the time had come for a dip. Once they had taken
the plunge, they rose to the occasion and gave us a bril-
liant display of swimming and diving stunts. Sea lions
are born actors and are eager for applause. The majority
of our landing party soon followed their example and
bathed, surrounded by the sea lions, who evidently con-
sidered the whole thing a great joke.
With pangs of real regret we saw on our return hike
the stately hull and the four masts of the Albatross rise
over the horizon on her way to fetch us from our island.
We had had a rather strenuous time, and had suffered
from a chronic thirst, but we were loath to reembark.
Unshaven and unwashed the scarcity of water had made
our ablutions perfunctory- we were brought on board.
There an excellent lunch and ice-cold beer consoled us
for our Paradise Lost.
Chapter 8
IN THE EASTERN PACIFIC
In his excellent book, The Floor of the Ocean, Reginald
A. Daly, the famous geologist of Harvard University,
writes: "The major mysteries of land geology itself are
planetary, and to a large extent their secrets lie hidden
under the ocean. The learning of those secrets will mean
a wide extension of the field of knowledge and there-
with a new call on human courage/' Obviously these
riddles can best be solved through collaboration be-
tween geology and oceanography which was one of
the main purposes of the Swedish Deep-Sea Expedition.
One of the enigmas of geological science concerns the
origin and the age of the enormous depression in the
Earth's crust which forms the basin of the Pacific Ocean.
One suggestion is that it represents the scar left behind
at the birth of our satellite, the Moon, when she was
torn out of the body of the Earth by a cataclysmic tidal
wave, raised by the Sun some three thousand million
years ago. Most geologists, however, consider the de-
pression to have been caused by internal forces in the
Earth's crust, forces which have shaped and reshaped
its features, lowering the ocean floor and raising the
75
76 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
continents. The same forces may also have raised island
"bridges," spanning the oceans from one continent to
another, and later, in a following geological age, have
again submerged them under the water surface.
If it were possible to prove that such land-bridges
have actually existed, it would help biologists and palae-
ontologists to explain how plants, wingless insects and
other non-aquatic animals have been able to spread
across water-filled chasms thousands of miles wide and
thousands of fathoms deep.
In the central Pacific Ocean the island groups, like
the submarine ridges supporting them, show a distinct
trend from the west-north-west toward the east-south-
east. According to some authorities, this is a sign that
they are remnants of old transoceanic land-bridges,
which became almost totally submerged many millions
of years ago.
The new technique used on the Albatross for study-
ing the deep ocean floor seemed to offer opportunities
for attacking this fascinating problem experimentally.
A gradual sinking of a land-bridge or of a festoon of
islands should be evident from the character of the sedi-
ment deposited after the sinking occurred. Perhaps
such a change of level might be apparent in the strat-
ification of a very long sediment core. And, if it were
not possible to raise cores sufficiently long to display
such strata, there was still the probability that the echoes
from exploding depth-charges, thrown back against the
bed-rock beneath the sediment carpet and recorded on
our oscillograms, would reveal the shape of the basin,
so as either to refute or confirm the supposed change in
level.
Our course across the Pacific had been chosen with
this purpose in mind. In general, practical consider-
IN THE EASTERN PACIFIC 77
ations already mentioned kept us within or near the
belt of equatorial calms in order to work in a minimum
of ocean swell and wind. Fortunately for us, that part
of the ocean offers problems of great interest, both as to
the bottom and as to the water masses over it, problems
well worthy of a close study by modern methods.
After leaving Balboa, the Albatross was at first headed
toward the west-south-west. Work was carried out in the
Gulf of Panama and in the open sea beyond it. The
cores raised there were exceptionally rich in remains
from coastal vegetation carried seaward, which had be-
come waterlogged and had sunk to the bottom. Dr.
Eriksson made a couple of successful horizontal hauls
with a large ring-net (Plate 9) at depths of 400 and 800
fathoms. A catch of fantastically shaped deep-sea fish
and invertebrate organisms was brought up from the
realm of eternal darkness. Some of them were provided
with luminous organs of amazing efficiency. The light-
economy realized by these living lamps of the deep is
much better than that which human ingenuity has so
far achieved. This biological light is practically "cold,"
i.e. it is almost all concentrated within the visible parts
of the spectrum. Hence no energy is wasted on infrared
heat rays which make up by far the greater part of the
output of our most efficient electric lights.
Our first objective was the Galapagos group, described
earlier. There five of us spent several days ashore.
After those who remained on the Albatross had finished
the study of the water strata and the bottom sediments
to the south of the group, and had taken the landing-
party aboard, her course was set west-north-west, so as
to give our oceanographers an opportunity for taking
sections on the Equatorial Counter-Current. On the
way, numerous attempts were made to raise long cores
78 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
and to sound the thickness of sediment by means of
exploding depth-charges. The bottom configuration in
this part of the Pacific was not very favorable for such
work. Its general ruggedness made the use of long cor-
ing-tubes too risky and also gave rise to a confusing
multitude of echoes from the explosions, and we repeat-
edly hit hard bottom a surprising phenomenon at
depths of between 2000 and 3000 fathoms. In one in-
stance, a broken-off fragment, sticking in the bit of the
corer, proved that the hard bottom consisted of a lava
bed due to a submarine eruption or extrusion of magma
of fairly recent date. We repeatedly met discouraging
bottom conditions as our cruise continued across the
Pacific and Indian Oceans. (Fig. 8.)
180
160
WO
I
PACIFl
oc
EAN
20-
'Ig0y5350fl
114 -r 5155m
_-/
CMC*
104*3200
/Marquesas
>T* islands
90
Tohiti
Fig. 8. Part of the Albatross* course over the Pacific.
IN THE EASTERN PACIFIC 79
Obviously, submarine volcanism has played a dom-
inant part in shaping the bottom configuration of the
two oceans. By far the greatest number of islands there
are volcanic cones, built from the ocean floor by re-
peated eruptions. Most of the summits protruding
above the ocean surface have been broken down by
wave-action and are crowned with diadems of living
coral. In certain cases the eruptions have been so sus-
tained and intense that the volcanic cones have been
raised thousands of feet above the surface, giving rise to
large islands, some of them, like Hawaii, with active vol-
canoes still on their summits.
The experience of the Swedish Deep-Sea Expedition
proved that these outbreaks of the subterranean fires
have acted also in a horizontal direction, producing
lava beds of considerable expanse. The formation of a
level bed of lava, at the point of encounter between red-
hot magma from below and ice-cold water from above,
was made possible by the fact that at depths greater than
1200 fathoms the water pressure exceeds the so-called
"critical pressure" of water vapor. At great depths,
therefore, water cannot "boil," so that the extrusion of
lava proceeds without any violent disturbance at the
surface. It is indeed possible, not to say probable, that
a similar formation of a lava cover on the top of more
ancient sediments has occurred several times in the same
locality, intervening sediment layers being formed be-
tween the lava beds during prolonged stages of volcanic
inactivity. In such instances, a multiple stratification
of lava beds, alternating with sediment, occurs.
Possibly this may also explain the surprising results
produced both in the Pacific and Indian Oceans the
failure of the exploding depth-charges to evoke any deep
echoes. Nowhere west of the Galapagos Islands were the
8O WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
echoes recorded as coming from a greater depth below
the surface of the sediment than about 1000 feet. If
present at all they generally came from reflecting sur-
faces situated much nearer the bottom. Compared with
results from the open Atlantic as well as from the Carib-
bean Sea, where echoes from many thousands of feet
down in the sediment were recorded, this result is sur-
prising.
It seems to contradict the widely accepted opinion
that the Pacific Ocean is the oldest sea of the world, and
ought to have the thickest sediment carpet on its rocky
floor. However, the thickness of the carpet depends not
only on the age of the ocean, i.e. on the total time of
accumulation, but also on the rate of accumulation,
which is known to vary widely. It seems prudent, there-
fore, not to draw far-reaching conclusions from the sedi-
ment soundings until they have been fully analyzed and
discussed.
Considerable judgment had to be exercised in the
choice of length of the coring-tube to be used. There
was always the risk of the long and rather fragile struc-
ture bending or breaking, if it happened to topple on
a steep slope when it reached bottom.
When we approached the eighteenth parallel north,
a southerly course was set, affording our oceanogra-
phers an opportunity for a second crossing of the equa-
torial current system.
The greatest water movements occurring on our
planet are not those of the Amazon nor of the Missis-
sippi Rivers, but those of the great ocean currents. They
carry incomparably larger water masses and, inciden-
tally, spread warmth from the tropics to higher latitudes
less favored with solar heat; or inversely, they transport
the Arctic and Antarctic cold toward the Equator. Most
J. Eriksson
A'. J'ettfrson
THE CORING-TUBE BENT AGAINST A T AVA
PLATE JOA
/.. BruMau
THE BUST OF CHARLES DARWIN ON CHATHAM ISLAND
PLATE n
A
LUNCH WITH DR. LAVAUD
PLATE 12
L. Bruneau
TAIPI BAY
IN THE EASTERN PACIFIC
8l
conspicuous among the great arteries of the ocean are
the Equatorial Currents. On both sides of the Equator
they carry warm surface water from east to west, which
gives rise to an accumulation of water off the eastern
coasts of the continents.
Especially in the Pacific Ocean this movement of
water from east to west is of gigantic dimensions. It
maintains a slope of the surface, which is the cause of
the remarkable Counter-Current, separating the two
Fig. 9. The Atlantic Convergence.
Equatorial Currents and moving in the opposite direc-
tion, i.e. from west to east. This east-bound current is
confined to a narrow strip of water, only a few degrees
of latitude in width, lying just north of the Equator. It
extends from near the Philippine Islands to the vicinity
of the Central American coast. The surface slope which
sustains it is not impressive, having only a tenth of a
million gradient.
The dynamics of the Counter-Current are most in-
teresting. In the Atlantic Ocean they were carefully
studied by the oceanographers of the German Meteor
Expedition, 1925-27. The schematic cross-section repro-
duced in Fig. 9 has been taken from their reports. As
82 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
is seen from the diagram, there are regions of water ris-
ing from some depth and spreading over the surface, so-
called "divergences," with an intermediate zone where
the water descends from the surface, a "convergence/'
The ascending water carries with it reserves of nutrient
salts, especially phosphates, and when it meets daylight
near the surface it provides food for an abundant vege-
tation of floating microscopic algaethe "grass" of the
ocean meadows which are thus concentrated along nar-
row strips in the middle of an otherwise relatively sterile
equatorial region. Minute animals or "zoa-plankton,"
grazing on these algae or "phyto-plankton," are con-
sumed by other larger marine organisms, invertebrate
animals like shrimps, medusae, etc. These in turn serve
as food for fish and other inhabitants of these favored
water strata. Such is the case to the south of the Galapa-
gos Islands, where suction from the rapidly moving
Humboldt Current brings up to the sunlit surface cold
water rich in nutrient salts. The same happens along
the Equatorial Counter-Current.
This remarkable fertilization of the ocean surface
from below also affects the bottom sediments, which
consist largely of the calcareous shells and the siliceous
skeletons sinking down from the upper water strata.
During the epochs of extensive glaciation which oc-
curred in our Quaternary Age, the trade winds and
travelling storms in high latitudes hardly could have
remained unaffected by the climatic changes. Whether
the curiously stratified condition of our long cores
taken near the equatorial region was due to climatic
changes with the rhythm of the great ice ages will be
known when the composition of these cores is analyzed.
During our crossings and recrossings over the equator-
ial current system, the oceanographic winch was work-
IN THE EASTERN PACIFIC 83
ing at short intervals night and day. Like the beads of a
rosary, the "reversing" water-bottles were clamped to
the thin but very strong steel wire rope with the "re-
versing" thermometers. The latter recorded the temper-
ature of the surrounding water to within o.oiC. at
depths, where they were made to reverse by means of
"messengers," small metal cylinders with an axial hole
in the center through which ran the instrument line.
Their impact on the water-bottle made it turn upside
down and, at the same time, hermetically enclosed a
sample of the water. Another messenger automatically
released by the impact ran down to the next deeper
water-bottle and made it reverse, and so on. Brought
up on deck after all bottles had been reversed at their
proper depths, the temperature was read on the revers-
ing thermometers and the water in each bottle sampled
for analysis by our chemist.
Between the complete oceanographic series at prede-
termined "stations," still more frequent observations of
the temperature in the uppermost water-layers were
made by means of an ingenious recording thermometer
called the "bathythermograph." An interesting result
from the oceanographic series deserves special mention.
Beneath the relatively shallow Counter-Current, gener-
ally at depths betweens 50 and 200 fathoms, the water
is almost stagnant. There the all-important oxygen has
become practically exhausted, partly by bacterial proc-
esses which accompany the disintegration of plankton
organisms sinking from the surface, and partly by the
respiration of marine organisms. The lowest figure we
found for the residual oxygen contained in this inter-
mediate water layer, to the west-north-west of the Gala-
pagos Islands, was only 0.04 c.c. per liter of water, or
84 WESTWARD HO WITH THE ALBATROSS
less than one per cent of the saturation value found at
the surface.
In the course of other oceanographic observations,
Dr. Jerlov seized an opportunity for measuring, by an
ultra-sensitive optical method, the amount of fine par-
ticles suspended within different water-layers. As a rule
the mid-ocean water masses are transparent, but char-
acteristic differences in their low turbidity were found
among the different strata. At certain depths a kind of
' 'cloud* ' made up of a great number of particles was
observed. Whether such "clouds" are mainly ultra-fine
organic fragments settling from the "ocean meadows/'
or extremely minute ash particles from recent volcanic
eruptions, or, at greater depths, particles of sediment
from the deposit stirred up by bottom currents, is still
an open question. Anyway, these particle studies have
proved very useful for characterizing the vertical water
movements in the zones of divergence and convergence.
Measurements of the submarine daylight of different
colors were also a feature of our oceanographic studies.
The electric winch for the light-measuring apparatus,
mounted in the stern of the ship, was set in action and
the electric current from the submerged "photo-ele-
ments" or rectifying cells was measured on a galvanom-
eter of high sensitivity placed in the main laboratory.
An unforeseen complication in these measurements was
caused by sharks swarming around the ship. Evidently
they mistook the glittering apparatus for a tidbit sent
down for their special gratification and made attacks on
it, sometimes biting through the electric insulation
around the cable.
By way of retaliation, and in order to instill in them
respect for modern science, many sharks were caught
and brought on deck, where they were promptly killed
IN THE EASTERN PACIFIC 85
by a bullet through the head. Because of the voracious
appetites of these creatures, we had, to our great regret,
to abstain from swimming. The danger from sharks has
long been a subject for discussion. Some optimists assert
that the sharks mean no real harm but simply have an
innate curiosity for the taste of human flesh. But none
of us had a mind to test this hypothesis.
Other more welcome visitors came to us by air. A
large black albatross took a rest on our deck, where it
was duly photographed before being set free. A still
rarer guest was a snow-white "tropical bird" adorned
with a long scarlet tail-feather. For a few minutes it
perched on our bulwark before taking wing again, one
of the loveliest sights of the tropical seas.
Birds were rare in the part of the ocean we were tra-
versing. We saw no more than a few dozen during the
five weeks we cruised from the Galapagos Islands to the
Marquesas. By then our water supply was running short,
and with considerable relief we saw, on a fine October
evening, the wild rugged rocks of mighty Nuku Hiva
appear through rifts in the golden clouds over the
setting sun.
Chapter 9
NUKU HIVA AND TAHITI
Anyone reading Robert Louis Stevenson or Herman
Melville on the Marquesas is captivated by their descrip-
tions of the marvellous scenery, the wild volcanic rocks
and the alluring coral beaches, which impart a romantic
beauty to these wonderful islands. There is, however,
an undertone of deep sadness running through their
tales of the slowly disappearing people, who only a cen-
tury ago were the most numerous and the most beauti-
ful inhabitants of the South Seas.
The Albatross dropped anchor in Taiohae Bay on
the south coast of Nuku Hiva, largest and most pictur-
esque of the Marquesas Islands. Volcanic cones rising
steeply out of an emerald-green sea protected our ship
against all except winds from the south, which hardly
ever bring gales in this part of the ocean. But for the
fantastic shape of the ridges above and the luxuriant
vegetation covering their slopes, we might have mis-
taken our surroundings for an inner part of a Norwe-
gian fiord.
Dr. Lavaud, a young Frenchman who was acting as
deputy-governor
